Going Grimdark
by Strop
Summary: Rose Lalonde's nightmares have landed her in a mental institution, but there is more happening here than she realises. Soon she will find herself caught up the the quivering throes of the broodfester tongues; they are stubborn throes indeed. [Currently on indefinite hiatus in the name of gratuitous revision.]
1. Chapter 1

I know the "Homestuck-characters-an-asylum" plotline has been done to death, but I just couldn't resist, and hope that this one manages to separate itself from the dregs and become something different. I may possibly try and add in some RosexKanaya later on, but I've never been much good at writing non-platonic relationships; still, it's worth a shot. Won't know until I try, I guess.

Homestuck is the intellectual property - if intellectual is the right word - of one Andrew Hussie.

...

The New Hope Mental Institution had a remarkably cheerful outlook for a mental hospital. It did not look at all the way Rose had expected it to. Her love of macabre psychological thrillers had lead her to imagine her mother's silver Mercedes-Benz crawling up a gritty gravel road towards a twisted wrought-iron gate, presumably with the name of the hospital set atop it in ominous black lettering. Behind the gate, she surmised, the hospital would loom oppressively, the equivalent of a large but hollow cement block with graffiti walls, grimy glass, and bars on the windows.

New Hope had none of these things, save for the bars, but these were slim installations on the windows of the upper floors. "Protection" rather than "prison." The hospital had really taken the word asylum to heart in its construction, not in the horror-movie sense but in that it was meant to be a berth for those who needed to escape from the world and into their own mad minds. The whitewashed outer walls and red-tiled roof could be considered homely, even comforting at a stretch. Even safe. But who, Rose wondered, were the people being kept safe? The ones within? Or all of the ordinary, sane people who walked without the walls of the complex?

Now as the car drew nearer she could see past the gate and the main building to a little tangle of smaller structures, possibly storage sheds or living quarters for the hospital employees. There were flowers. They seemed out of place, almost like some sort of disturbing joke. The whole place was a joke. This was no mental hospital, this was some sort of day care for people who spent their days wandering about in the picturesque landscapes of their delusional minds. No criminally insane here, the buildings seemed to say. Just us oddments with psychedelic views of the world. Rose was almost considering ordering her mother to turn the car around and find her a different hospital where she might be taken seriously. But perhaps this was just her stinted view of the world that made her reject the pleasantness of this place. Her expectations had not been met, but most people would have been pleased at the discovery. So instead she leaned against the window and waited as her mother pressed the buzzer by the gate and informed the crackling voice that replied that she was her with the new patient, Rose Lalonde.

She had wanted to drive herself, but her mother had insisted that patients did not submit themselves to mental hospitals, and in any case it wouldn't be fair if Rose did not let her own mother accompany her on this stalwart journey. Rose had grudgingly accepted. She wasn't sure if she would come to regret her decision or not.

As the Mercedes rolled on through the now-open gate, Rose glanced at the wall around the complex and was pleased to see at least something that rang true to her definition of what a mental hospital - asylum, she corrected herself, should be. Chain link fence capped the stacked cement blocks and curved inwards, the edges lines with coils of barbed wire. This place was not nearly as innocent as it seemed. Was anything, really? Her dreams had seemed innocent enough when they first began several months ago, nothing more than a dim reminder of her childhood, when she had been so enthralled by all things eldritch. They had come in the night and evaporated at the first touch of morning, forgotten among the busy tasks of the day.

When the dreams had become nightmares that kept her awake, innocent was what her visits to the doctor were. She complained of insomnia, which was true enough.

The nightmares kept her awake and then began to haunt her again during what little sleep she managed to catch on the bus and in between meetings at her job at Derse Developing. Mr. Noir, the manager of her small group of technical writers, had griped that they were all getting paid far too much for the little work they did, Rose most of all with her little naps that kept cutting into valuable company time. Then later he had suggested sleeping pills, and Rose relayed the request to her doctor, who prescribed them to her for several weeks.

The pills didn't work. If anything they made things worse, trapping her in a drug-induced stupor while eldritch abominations danced through her field of vision with threatening gaits and plucked the very stars from the sky. Innocent was the phone call she made to her mother one night because she couldn't sleep, and whenever she closed her eyes the abominations returned with their boils and tentacles and puckered flesh, whenever she stopped blasting Tchaikovsky into her ears at full volume the voices returned to whisper things into her ears. Not that she admitted any of this to anyone. To admit it would be to accept that she had given up, that she couldn't cope. To accept that she, Rose Lalonde, was afraid.

After complaining about being called at one in the bloody morning, her mother had voiced her own concerns, saying that perhaps Rose was suffering from overwork, it was all the same with those big companies, they never paid attention to all the little people in their employment. Disgruntled as Rose was that her mother had referred to her as a "little person," she had accepted the explanation without argument and called in sick, claiming to have been struck down with some kind of flu. Flu took at least a week to run it's course. Surely that would be enough to make it all better.

Instead, it became worse.

Two days before she had gotten into her mother's car and begun the long drive towards Good Hope she had gone out to shop for groceries. She was reluctant to leave the house - she didn't want anyone seeing her in her frazzled, sleep-deprived state - but one could only survive on bland soup and canned ravioli for so long. So she had gotten on the bus to Downtown, assuring herself it would be just a quick trip and that maybe going out and about would be able to distract her some more. She had already been working constantly on a large project for work, burying herself in lines of code and explanations of what needed to be fixed where and how to get about to doing it. Once she had typed the word "Skaia" instead of "skills" and wondered what it meant.

The bus. Sitting all the way in the back next to an old bag lady with so many headscarves it was almost impossible to see her face. The ends twisted and waved like tentacles, coiled and sprouted strange-no. She was seeing things now. She wouldn't allow herself to see things. She wouldn't allow herself to lose her calm demeanor in the middle of a bus filled with people, some of whom she knew. So when the mutter of the passengers became warped and haunted, the rumble of the bus engines like the sound of behemoths stirring in deep caverns, Rose Lalonde did not scream. Instead, she stuffed her earbuds into her ears and cranked up _Waltz of the Flowers _at full volume, and closed her eyes, breathing deeply.

Ten seconds later they were open again and she was screaming because the bus was gone and instead she was floating over a vast abyss of darkness in which the only light was a small blue and white speck in the distance.

And after that her eyes were open _again _and she was lying on the floor of the bus with anxious passangers gathered around her, concerned looks on their faces. She had stood and brushed the whole thing off as a mere nightmare, gotten off the bus and gone about her business, returned home with bags loaded to the brim with fresh vegetables and other produce. As she stuffed a bundle of carrots into the back of the fridge she tried not to think about the low humming that was building in the beck of her mind. As she chopped up a handful of onions and tossed them into the slow-cooker she tried not to remember the old lady on the bus with the moving shawls. She tried and failed.

Finally, she called her mother and told her everything.

And that was how she had come to be here, stepping out of the car with one hand clutching a beaten old suitcase and the other gripping the plastic handle of the door. The weather was pleasent, a light breeze playing through the trees and the sun beaming down from a cloudless sky. Not the proper weather for one's admission to an asylum, Rose though. There should be storm clouds gathered overhead, or at least sitting on the horizon. It should be raining. If she perhaps chose to write a book about all of this when it was over - if it ever was over, but she didn't like to consider that possibility - she would have to change a few of the facts. You couldn't enter an asylum on a sunny day. She supposed it could be considered ironic, which was something, at least.

The inside of the hospital was even cheerier than the outside. There was a fish tank set in the wall. The occupants were all tropical fish of varying degrees of color - either way they looked as though a drunk artist had mixed all the paints on his palette together and splashed them onto the poor creatures. Poor indeed; they were all clustered in a corner blowing nervous bubbles as a troll with a ridiculous amount of hair pressed her face against the glass and made "glub" noises. One of the patients, probably. Harmless enough. If this was the kind of people that this hospital catered to, Rose wasn't too sure how well she would fit in.

Suddenly the girl's glubbing ceased and she began to strike at the glass, yelling something about culling the fish. A nurse who had been hovering nearby swooped in and gently led the girl away, ignoring her protests. She gave an apologetic smile to Rose as she passed, and then vanished through a door at the other end of the lobby. Rose regarded the door with a vague interest, then turned her attentions back to her mother, who was leaning against the front desk and had struck up a lively conversation with the secretary, who was laughing quietly. No surprises there. Her mother had always been an avid conversationalist, a social butterfly, so unlike her daughter who preferred the company of a good book and her pet cat Jaspers to a human being. Rose wished that Jaspers could have accompanied her, but the hospital had a strict no-pets policy. Something about not wanting to be liable for the animal's safety.

The receptionist waved Rose over and she begrudgingly joined her mother at the front desk. The wall behind it was inlaid with silver letters: _New Hope Mental Institution - broken minds made whole. _Rose wondered exactly who had come up with the cheesy slogan and how long they had been allowed to live after bringing it into being. At least it didn't have an exclamation point at the end.

"Rose Lalonde, yes?" The receptionist pushed forwards a stack of papers that reeked of bureaucracy. Most of the blank spaces had already been filled in with her untidy scrawl, and in the rest Rose recognised her mother's looping letters. "I'll just need you to sign here, and here, and here too if you don't mind. The nurse will be along in a minute or so, why don't you have a seat over there?" The woman indicated a plush green armchair that sat in the corner next to its twin and several plastic ferns. Rose took the pen and signed, wondering whether she should have read the small print first. There was no helping it, though. She was going to be here whether she liked it or not, if not until she was cured then at least until she could convince the doctors she was sane.

She really was.

Her mother gave the papers a once-over and handed them back over the counter with a plastic smile. She pecked Rose on the cheek and bustled out the door. Rose watched as the Mercedes-Benz revved up and vanished into a glittering point on the long road. There was no going back now. No going anywhere for the moment, except for into one of those armchairs. She dragged her suitcase over to the corner and sank down onto the stiff cushions. The leaf of a plastic fern tickled her elbow, but she ignored it, instead thinking about how boring the room actually was, even with the feeble attempts made to spruce it up. The fish tank was all right. She had read somewhere that fish were supposed to instil a sense of calm in people, but the only thing she was feeling now was boredom and a dim regret. The visions and voices were choosing to be inactive today. Perhaps the action of admitting herself to the asylum had driven them away? It was a small hope, but she doubted it was true. The visions had been intense. They wouldn't be driven away by something like this.

Some sort of delirium, perhaps, the dropout psychology student inside of her whispered.

"I'm not delirious," Rose said, only to realise that she had voiced her thought out loud.

"I'm sure you aren't," a voice replied. The tones were calm and even, each word pronounced with utter conviction. Rose blinked and looked up into the smiling face of the nurse. This one was different than the one who had taken the girl at the fish tank away. For one thing, the first nurse had been human. This one was a troll, thin and graceful even in her green hospital uniform, with slim horns that curved into an arc over her head. The one on the right broke the symmetry; it stuck inwards several centimetres. Somehow this irked Rose, though she could not imagine why.

"Yes, quite," she replied, her tone more sarcastic than she had intended. "I know I am not crazy and there's no need to patronise me, Miss...?"

"Maryam. Kanya Maryam. And you are, if all your papers are correct, a Miss Rose Lalonde. I'll be taking you on a quick tour of the institution, introduce you to a few of the other patients, and explain our rules and regulations, and then I'll show you to your room." After seeing the look on Rose's face, she added, "It hasn't got padded walls, if that's what you're thinking. We reserve those for the higher-risk patients, and I will assume that you are not and have no intention of becoming one of those, am I correct? Now come on, lots to see." She smiled, showing delicate fangs, and headed towards the door. Rose grabbed her suitcase and followed, trying to repress her emotions: nervousness, and some excitement. She had always been fascinated by asylums, and even if this one did not match the ones that she had read about in any way shape or form, it was bound to be an interesting experience at the very least.

The hallway beyond was lined with doors bearing plaques carved with the first initial and last name of the resident. "The doctor's offices," Kanaya explained, pointing them out as the passed. Rose only glanced at them, but caught some of the names: J. Egbert and J. Harley. Hadn't there been a Harley at the college she had attended? It was probably just a coincidence; Harley was a common enough name, but how odd to find it again here. "The patients all live on the upper floors, hence the bars on the like to give them a view but we don't want anyone doing anything foolish, like jumping out the window. Not that they could, of course. The windows are all built with bulletproof glass and securely locked."

"I see. And do you have this security because you are worried that someone might escape, or simply because it means you don't have to worry about filling out paperwork if someone dies?" Kanaya laughed.

"Both." Rose didn't think she was joking.

They climbed up two flights of stairs, bypassing the first couple of the upper floors as well as the patients they housed. It was oddly quiet, save for the doctors making their rounds and the sound of singing coming from behind a door near the end of the hall. "You'll be on the fourth floor, so to make things easier I'll only be showing you the patients there. You'll get to speak with some of them later, of course. Every day we let everyone loose in the yard for an hour or so. I go there often myself. It's quite easy to go a bit stir-crazy in here." The comment made Rose smile, if only a little. So everyone in this madhouse was crazy in one way or another, were they? Any more and the irony here would be so thick you could cut it with a knife.

The fourth floor was not quite so quiet as the others. More singing emitted from the door to Rose's left when she exited the stairwell, and the words were often replaced with high-pitched glubbing. Down the hall someone was banging on the wall and shouting unintelligible things, and beyond that was a voice speaking in Russian. The sentences were always built up of eight words, Rose noticed. Always eight. She made a note of these observations and peered in through the window to her left. The troll girl from before was sitting on the bed and throwing plush squids at the wall, a huge grin on her face. Kanaya sidled in next to her. "I saw her downstairs," Rose commented. "At the fish tank."

"Ah, yes. This is Feferi, Piexes. She's got a bit of a hyperactive disorder and some other funny things going on in her brain. We let her downstairs to look at the fish every once in a while to keep her happy, although there are still a few issues with this. No doubt you saw her banging on the glass?" Rose nodded.

"She talked about killing the fish."

"Culling, dear, but yes. Although this one has a bit of a differrent definition for the word - thinks it means to save someone. She wants to let the fish out of their tank, but she doesn't understand that they'll die, poor thing."

"I see."

"Quite." The pair moved on.

The next room was empty, and Kanaya noted that this would be Rose's while she was here. Rose opened the door and set her suitcase down just inside. No point in lugging the weight around for the rest of the tour. The room was the same as all the others she had seen so far, with a bed in the corner, a small set of shelves, and a closet set into the wall. Someone had placed a small vase on the windowsill with a flower in it, though she could not imagine why. As Kanaya had said, there were long bare covering the window, and a slight distortion spoke of the thickness of the glass. The floor was covered with a stubby brown carpet and a florescent light flickered from the ceiling. "Very practical," she commented, for lack of a better word. "Although I see there is a flower on the windowsill." Kanaya smiled.

"I just put that there because I thought you might like the room brightened up just a little."

"Oh. Thank you, I suppose. I promise not to break the vase and use the pieces to mutilate myself or attack anyone with. Nor will I eat the flower."

"That's good. Shall we move on now?" Rose left the room and the tour continued. There was Karkat, a stubby little troll with the horns to match, who stalked in circles around his room making faces at the walls. When he spotted Rose peering in at him through the window he bared his fangs and stuck his head into the closet. Paranoid schizophrenia, Kanaya told her. Next was Nepeta, who smiled and waved hello, then proceeded to pick apart the fabric of her pillowcase and rip the feathers into shreds, giggling maniacally. She was here because she didn't recognize morality; she had set fire to the neighbor's cat and then thrown it into a swimming pool and watched it drown. Then Sollux, who was bipolar; and Aradia, who had done nothing but sit in the middle of her bed all day and stare at the wall until the lights went out, when she would start shouting and write strange messages all over the walls with a piece of charcoal. Rose noticed the past tense and asked why, if she was now sane, she was still in the hospital. Kanaya gave her a strange look.

"What do you mean, still here?"

"Er...Are all the patients on this floor trolls?" Rose asked instead, changing the subject. She was relieved when Kanaya continued to answer her questions as though nothing strange had happened. Still, she wondered, what had Kanaya meant by that? Of course Aradia was still here; Rose stole a second glance through the window to her room just in case it had been a trick of the light, but the ram-horned troll still stood at the window. She decided not to press the issue any further.

"No, not all," Kanaya told her. "You just happen to be in a section with a lot of them. There are quite a few all over the hospital, actually. We are one of the few institutions who are willing to accept them as patients. Most others are reluctant to do so because we can be a rather violent species. Mental illnesses can only make that worse." Kanaya stopped in front of another door and looked in. "Ah, this one is interesting. He believes he is nuclear physicist who used to work for the government, and every time I stop by he asks me if the parts to build his doomsday machine have arrived. When I tell him there were no packages for him then he tries to ask me out to dinner."

"And do you know why he does this?"

"Not really, no. Now, let me see, there are still a couple more down this way-" Something huge and mutated loomed in the dark, twisting up from a small corner of the ceiling and tearing chunks of wood and plaster out of the wall. The world was suddenly blank and colourless and smelled of plaster dust, a jagged creation of stark shadows and blinding white highlights along the edges of things. Rose could see through the walls, see the asylum residents crouching behind closed doors with fangs and claws and twisted horns. And beyond that the building broke apart and showed her great eldritch things that lay among the stars with the white-and-blue planet sitting in their midst, forever unaware, forever silent. Where was she now? Where was Kanaya? Where-but this was just another dream, wasn't it. Wasn't it? Yes, now she was sure, how could she have let herself go like that, let herself slip up and-oh God, there were the voices now, screaming ancient chants under a bloody sky and-

"Rose!" She opened her eyes, the visions sinking back into the dregs of her mind as quickly as they had come. They vanished like actors behind a velvet curtain, unseen but ready to return at a moment's notice, should their cue come. She felt the wall at her shoulder; she had slumped against it, her fingers digging into the plaster. Kanaya had one hand on her shoulder and was shaking her frantically. The other was wrapped around Rose's wrist. It was unnaturally cold, but what did she know about what temperature trolls normally were?

"It was nothing," Rose lied. "I'm used to it." The tremor in her voice betrayed her, though she doubted that anyone would have believed her in this situation, especially someone who knew of her "condition." Someone like Kanaya. Disbelief and worry was written right across the troll's face as she frowned.

"Don't try that with me, darling. I know that you're lying. We shall finish the tour some other time when you are rested. I'll take you back to your room and fetch a doctor to come and have a look at you." She began to lead Rose back down the hall by the hand, but the girl yanked herself free and straightened, determined to finish the trek herself. Her vision still seemed a little lopsided and the light a tad bright, but she was sure that it was nothing to be worried about. Some rest and she would be fine - if she could rest at all.

As she passed by Aradia's room she couldn't help herself and gave a final glance towards the mysterious occupant.

The girl was gone. Rose stopped and stumbled against the wall. Where had she gone? She had been there not moments before, and this was a hospital. People didn't just vanish like that! She relayed these concerns to Kanaya, who responded to them with the same puzzled look as before.

"Rose," she began cautiously, "That room has been empty for weeks. Are you _sure _you are all right?"

"What?" She couldn't be hallucinating. She just couldn't. She wasn't crazy, and how was she supposed to prove it to the doctors and to her mother if on her very first day the nurse thought she was seeing things? Aradia had been there when she had first looked, she was certain, but why did Kanaya respond to her queries with such confusion? Aradia _had _existed, Kanaya had spoken of her herself...but using the past tense. "Had," she had said when mentioning the girl's illness. Had. Whoever this Aradia was, she no longer resided in this hospital.

Rose shuffled into her room and flopped down on the bed. It was hardly quality comfort. The mattress was hard and a loose spring dug into the base of her spine. Kanaya hovered in the doorway, as if she feared that her patient might suddenly have a relapse if she took her eyes off her for a second. Rose rolled her eyes and waved the nurse away. The door closed and there was the soft _snik _of a key in the lock. So much for trusting her to stay sane and not break out. It was beginning to become a more and more appealing option. Not that there was anything wrong with the place, or Kanaya, for that matter - if anything, Kanaya had been the best thing to happen to her all day - but _something _about it worried her. Maybe it was the familiar nameplate on the door of the doctor's office; maybe it was the fact that she was seeing girls who were not supposed to be here. Rose signed and stared up at a crack in the ceiling, waiting for the doctor to arrive and seal her fate.


	2. Chapter 2

Here you all go, next chapter. This one's a bit shorter, but the mystery deepens!

The universal equation: HS = Andrew Hussie.

...

Dr. John Egbert hardly looked like the sort of man who who ran a mental hospital. He was young, somewhere around Rose's own age, and entered the room with a broad grin on his face. He seemed the type of person who would be better off working at an ice cream parlor or handing out cotton candy and balloons to children at fairs, and somehow manged to keep his cheerful demeanor all through Rose's explanations of her symptoms. She knew that the information had all been written down and submitted before her arrival, but the good doctor had wanted to hear the words from her own mouth, so she begrudgingly complied. He had sat on the bed next to her and listened intently to every word, nodding occasionally and marking things down on a clipboard. Rose noticed the words _dementia _and _hallucinations_, which she recognized easily due to Dr. Egbert's large handwriting, and then one that she didn't and hardly noticed at all. It had been tucked away in the corner of the page, as though the doctor had been ashamed of writing it.

_Grimdark. _She'd never heard of the word, but could guess at its meaning. It sounded like the sort of expression to have its roots in gothic novels or the odd book about wizards. When she pointed it out, Doctor Egbert laughed and looked slightly flustered.

"I should have known you would be looking over my shoulder, didn't think that you'd catch that if I wrote it small. Of course, Jade - that would be the esteemed Dr. Harley - is always going on about how my handwriting is so chunky you could make soup out of it, she likes her jokes, you know. I'm a bit of a prankster myself, but no need to worry about that, we're all business here. Oh dear, I'm rambling now, aren't I." Rose nodded. "Sorry, sorry, I'm just not used to this sort of a sit-down, usually the other doctors handle it or the patient is too crazy to talk straight."

"So why are you investigated my case yourself, Dr. Egbert?" Rose asked. She had no desire to become the hospital's "special case resident" just because her visions were something slightly out of the ordinary. No doubt other people come in here all the time babbling strange things or claiming that the world was otherwise; schizophrenics and the like. The only difference between her and them was that she was actually aware that the darkness that came for her wasn't real, that the voices weren't really there. In some ways she was fascinated by herself, not out of narcissism but because she had always been curious about the peculiarities of the human mind. That was what had driven her to attempt a degree in psychology, an attempt which had failed after halfway through her first year she had realized that most of the people in the room - of which over half were women - would either fail to find a job or become the sort of therapist that ends up despising their life and the people they work with.

So she confined her psychoanalyses to her coworkers and kept her observations to herself, only letting the words come when a particularly desperate acquaintance - she was not quite so familiar with them as to consider them friends - needed a shoulder to cry on and an ear to wear away with their worries. But now, here she was with mental problems all of her own, a mind to study up close and personal. She imagined recording her view of herself and the world as she slowly descended into deeper denial. How would it appear to those who read it? A logical dissection of one's condition, or the ramblings of a madwoman? An interesting read whichever path was taken.

"Please, call me John, I don't mind. The case - it's interesting, I've never seen anything like it before - and I've seen a lot, I can tell you. Most people might not pay a lot of attention but when you spend five years in the business you learn to pick out the interesting stuff," the doctor replied, making more notes. Several of them mentioned coffee and a few seemed to apply to other patients. John was a busy man, apparently. Rose pursed her lips. Even in her thoughts it seemed strange to call the doctor by his first name, but she supposed she would adjust to it eventually, like she would have to adjust to so many other things: this room, the restricted freedom she would be allowed, the other patients. What would it be like to converse with madmen? Perhaps it would be more enlightening than the talks she held with ordinary people, who were so fascinated by mundane matters like coffee and the daily commute and who was a terrible boss. If anything it would at least be interesting; at worst, possibly mind-scarring.

"So what does Grimdark refer to?"

"Oh, don't worry about that, it's just a thing-"

"No, I want to know." Otherwise she would spend the next couple of hours puzzling out every possible meaning for the strange phrase. Grimdark. A combination of the words grim and dark, obviously used to describe something of either persuasion when an ordinary word would not suffice. There she was at it again, nitpicking. No wonder her mother had said she should be a writer, but you could never be certain of where you were going with a job like that. As it was she had studied computer science and taken up a position as a technical writer. Close enough, though still not, as her mother called it, "the real deal."

"Well, I suppose you do have the right to. I hope you don't mind if I talk for a while? I'll try my best not to get sidetracked."

"Of course." Anything, so long as it gave her even some information.

"It's not exactly the most scientific of explanations, but there was an interesting text I found back when I was taking a theology class at the university that mentioned something similar to this. I just thought I'd write it down. You know, consider all the possibilities. I mean, it's a ridiculous thought, I know, but sometimes I just can't help myself with these things, you know how it is. Find something that piques your interest and you can't help but pursue it." The doctor paused for a moment and Rose kept her expression neutral, not wanting to deter the explanation should John think she thought him a crackpot fool. However, Rose had met enough of those in her lifetime, and she recognised him as a man simply open to new ideas and passionate about his work. Here was a man who could help her, if he could manage to stay on subject.

"Do continue," she prompted.

"Apparently there was a tribe - Dersites, I think they were called - who believed that somewhere in the heavens there was a world called Skaia, and then beyond that a place called the Furthest Ring. It was some kind of paradox space, but I won't bore you with the science of that. Now, in this Furthest Ring were said to live great and terrifying gods who brought madness to all who looked upon them. Called Horrerterrors or something like that - yes, I know it sounds a bit funny but it's hardly a perfect translation. _However_, those who didn't go mad were given the gift of the Sight, of prophecy. And this is where it gets interesting.

"They _also_ believed that some day there would be a prophet, called the Seer of Light, who would come and tell them of the coming of the gods. It wasn't specific on whether this was a good thing or not, but I guess the people were pretty happy about it. Apparently the Seer would be afflicted - or blessed, I should say - with visions of the gods, the ability to see spirits of the dead, and the gift of tongues. There was a name for this - not a perfect translation either, mind you - it was called going Grimdark." John spoke the last two words with an agonizing slowness, an attempt at dramatic effect, but all it did was make him seem as though he were trying to explain something to a small child. Rose knew that that was hardly his intention, but felt slightly miffed all the same. It reminded her a bit of her mother.

"And you think _I'm _going Grimdark?" she asked. John ran a hand through his hair and adjusted his glasses, letting out a nervous laugh.

"Of course not, this is all just stories and japery on my account. It's probably just a mild form of dementia, although I don't know if that makes you feel any better."

"Not particularly."

"Well, there is always the chance that you'll recover; we can try and find you some medicine."

"And then I shall be able to return to society as a well-adjusted, highly-functioning adult?"

"Sure."

Going Grimdark. It sounded ridiculous to her practical mind. She had read stories of other people who had gone mad and claimed to have visions, but was certain that most of them were either drunk, high, or actually insane. In the case that someone actually was a prophet, who would believe him? A priest somewhere on the other side of the States had claimed - twice - that the day was soon coming when all good Christians would be taken up into heaven. The Rapture, they had called it. Rose had not expected anything to happen, and as the fateful day passed by without incident, and the one after that, she had sat in her living room with a cup of coffee and a smug look on her face. Let others believe in this japery, as John had called it, but hers was a logical mind. To be sure she was fascinated by mythology and the supernatural, but that didn't mean she would believe it was true.

There was no way she could be this so-called Seer of Light.

If she allowed herself to consider the possibility any more then she would soon find herself believing it, and that would do no good for anyone, least of all herself.

Suddenly she became aware that John was speaking again.

"Now if you'll just excuse me, there are other patients I have to see and a boatload of paperwork to file. I'll see you later, Rose!" The doctor left the room with his lab coat swishing behind him, as if it were waving goodbye to the lonely patient.

She turned to investigate the flower on the windowsill more closely. It was currently the most interesting thing in the room, and she was determined to avoid unpacking her belongings for as long as possible. It wasn't that she had a lot stuffed into her travel-beaten trunk; a few sets of clothes, several thick books, and a couple of items of sentimental value and her knitting things hardly added up to heavy labor. It was that unpacking would make things final.

The flower in the little glass vase was a rose. Apparently Kanaya had a sense of humor, but maybe that was a good thing. Having a stoic nurse that spoke with clipped, even tones that sounded as though they had been part of her medical training would hardly have been enjoyable. Rose tried to remember all of the possible symbolism associated with the flower for lack of anything better to think about: love; beauty; passion. Nothing unexpected there, nor particularly interesting. It was only when you began to take numerology into account that the symbolism became something worth looking in to. Three roses were a symbol of guiding principles. A rose with seven petals represented order, presumably because in the Pythagorean theorem seven was equal to perfection. Eight petals meant rebirth and renewal.

Eight. Why did the number suddenly seem to have such significance?

Then she remembered: the Russian-speaker from down the hall. His or her sentences had consisted of only eight words, an orderly, rigid construction that suggested severe OCD. Kanaya had not gotten around to introducing her, due to Rose's sudden flash. Were the door not shut and locked, Rose would have gone to have a look for herself. She would have to wait for Kanaya to return before she did anything. Wasn't there a button or something that she could push to call the nurse up to her room? Most hospitals had them, after all.

She searched the room thoroughly, even trying to drag the dresser away from it's position against the wall, only to find it had been bolted to the floor. A sensible precaution. Her only discovery was a small newspaper clipping stuffed into the gap between the floor and the bottom of the piece of furniture. Someone had gone over the article with a red pen and a highlighter, circling words and adding their own notes in an illegible scrawl. _Fire_, _death_, and the name _Aradia Medigo _had been slashed through with s streak of bright yellow, and an arrow pointed from the name to another set of notes. Still illegible.

Where had the clipping come from? Presumably from the room's original occupant, but why had they done it?

Aradia Medigo - she had heard part of the name before, during her tour with Kanaya. The girl who had been mentioned to her only in the past tense. The girl who, according to this article, had perished in a fire at this hospital several months ago. It had been a small incident; a patient on the floor below her had somehow broken their lamp and set fire to the ceiling, burning through to the room above and killing both the occupant and the would-be arsonist.

The paper fluttered to the floor and Rose sat down in shock.

Dead?

She knew she had seen the girl, clear as day, standing at the window. Perhaps there had been a certain translucentness to her, but she had put it down to the bright sunlight streaming into the room. And perhaps the edges of the girl's grey skirt had been ripped and singed, but there was an explanation for that too. What there wasn't an explanation for was how, if the girl was dead, she had seen her. Or maybe it was just a look-alike, Kanaya's confusion feigned. The whole thing could be some sort of cruel joke to make her think she was losing it. But.

_But. _

John's words came back to her, unbidden: _Apparently the Seer would be afflicted - or blessed, I should say - with visions of the gods, the ability to see spirits of the dead, and the gift of tongues._

The ability to _see spirits of the dead._

No.

_No._

This was ridiculous, this was impossible. She wouldn't allow herself to believe it. She was _not _going Grimdark, and that was that.

The door swung open, causing her to flinch. She grabbed the newspaper clipping and shoved it back under the dresser where she had found it, bruising her knuckles in the process. Kanaya stood in the doorway, a syringe in her hand.

"Just dropped by to take a quick blood sample," she said jovially, not noticing the look of shock that had permanently affixed itself to Rose's face.

"Ah-yes, very well." Rose stood and sat back down on the bed, proffering her arm and averting her eyes. She had no problem with shots ar the sting that accompanied them, but the sight of a needle being shoved underneath her skin made her stomach clench uncomfortably. There was a cold sensation in the crook of her elbow as Kanaya rubbed on some sort of numbing solution, and then a prick and a feeling of hollowness as the blood was slowly drawn out. Finally Kanaya straightened and smiled.

"All done."

Rose glanced at the red spot on her arm where the needle had gone in. The spot itched slightly, but that was all. "May I inquire as to what this is for?"

"Just to make sure your white blood cell count is at the proper level, and a few other things. We don't want our patients catching any blood diseases, or blood-transferable diseases, so we take weekly injections from all of our patients." It seemed a strange procedure for a mental hospital, but insofar Kanaya had not given Rose any reason not to trust her; and besides, what reason would she have to lie? _She could have lied about Aradia, _Rose reminded herself, but that was hardly a solid claim on which to base her accusations, if any.

"I was wondering if we could finish the tour of this section," she asked instead. "Due to the...incident I'm afraid I've been left wondering about the other patients." Another smile from Kanaya.

"It's about time for your floor to be let out in the yard. You'll get to speak with them personally, then."

It was an exiting, if rather frightening, prospect. But perhaps the other patients could tell her something more about the newspaper clipping, about Aradia, and about the hospital itself. She was lax to reveal her discovery to Kanaya, since seeing ghosts - or what she thought was ghosts - hardly registered as sane, especially when she had already attested to having strange visions. As the nurse turned to leave Rose snatched up the paper from beneath the dresser again, sticking it into the pocket of her skirt. She would show it to the others when she got outside.

As they descended down the stairs she glanced behind her and saw the schizophrenic - Karkat - staring suspiciously at her from behind the railing. Who knew what was going on in his mind. Perhaps he thought this all some sort of plot, saw her as some sort of infiltrator into his secret life behind the walls of the hospital. She smiled wanly at him, though it didn't seem to do much good. No matter. She would speak to him later and find out what the situation was herself.

And maybe, she would get some of the answers she was looking for.

...

Have another cliffhanger! You may gripe and groan but I bet you all secretly enjoy them.


	3. Chapter 3

Hello again darlings, have another chapter. Not sure how much this one actually advances the plot, but we do get to meet a few new characters. Well, I say new, but really all that that means is that we get to hear some new people speak.

For some reason I find dialogue scenes really annoying to write. Not because of the speaking itself, but because of what goes in between. It antagonizes me.

Homestuck belongs to Andrew Hussie.

...

The garden was large and walled in on all sides by the hospital and its barred windows. Barbed wire had been strung across the edges of the roof, a last precaution against the unlikely: a patient scaling the wall like a spider and scrambling to freedom across the red brick shingles. Unlikely, but not unaccounted for. To be sure, "freedom" in this case meant a forty foot drop to the hard ground, but if someone could climb up then they could presumably climb down. That was what the outer wall and its chain-link were for. The security here was tighter than it appeared; the fish-eye lenses tucked into the corners of the ceiling and the clue-clad security guards who lounged nonchalantly by doorways hardly seemed obvious unless you payed attention.

Rose was not the first one from her floor to step out into the spring sunshine. Already the fish tank girl Feferi sat by the fountain with a nurse who prevented her patient from plunging into the sparkling water. the troll held one of her stuffed cuttlefish beneath a waterspout and moved it back and forth, making glubbing noises, much like the way a young boy might wave his model airplanes about in the air and pretend that they could really fly. Sollux sat nearby next to a bed of flowers. He seemed calmer than before. Bees buzzed in multitudes around his head as red and blue sparks flashed in the air. A few had settled on his shoulders and legs, but he didn't seem to mind. If anything, the troll seemed to be enjoying it. There was a wicked grin on his face. It was peculiar, but everyone here had their quirks - and their mental problems - so what did it matter if he attracted a few bees?

Suddenly the nearly invisible buzzing increased to a low drone, and there were far more than a few of the insects swarming now. They spiraled into the air, dispersing as the sparks around Sollux's head increased in magnitude and crackled electrically. No, not dispersing, Rose realized. The bees had a definite destination in mind. They drifted towards the delusional scientist from before, who was leaning against a wall and making notes on a yellow legal pad. He was concentrating so hard on his work that he didn't notice the insects until they were right on top of him, and bolted away towards the building, yelping with pain from the stings and slapping at the offending creatures with his notepad.

By the flowers, Sollux had keeled over with laughter and was dragged out of the yard by a pair of burlesque security guards. Kanaya sighed and shook her head, as though she had seen this situation occur many times before.

"Would you mind enlightening me as to what we have just witnessed?" Rose asked.

"Those two have disliked each other from the moment they met," Kanaya replied, casting an amused glance at the bickering duo. "Sollux is a psiioniic, so he has a slight advantage when it comes to their arguments."

"Like the bees?"

"Yes, like that. He can control them somehow, and he won't tell us how he does it, if he speaks at all. He's got a bit of a lisp that he's sensitive about. We've had this happen a couple of times before, and we've told him to stop, even revoked his garden privileges, but it always happens again, one way or another. I can't imagine what the trouble must have been this time. They always did enjoy mocking each other."

"I see." It was a rivalry, then. Rose wondered how it had come about, but there were more pressing questions that came to mind at the moment, more necessary tasks. For one thing, she wanted to speak to each of the patients that she had been introduced to her - that was, the ones that were available at the moment, certain parties have been removed from the garden for their behavior - as well as the few that had been passed over because of her Incident. She seemed to have become resigned to calling it that in her mind, incident with a capital I. It was hardly a stroke and she had no desire to call it a vision. Vision suggested that she considered herself a Seer, and that would do no good for her at all. It was best to not think on these matters for too long.

She excused herself from Kanaya's presence - was it just her imagination, or did the troll seem almost disappointed to lose her company? - and started towards the fountain, where Feferi was. The nurse on watch gave her a wane smile and nodded, saying that it was perfectly all right for the two patients to communicate.

Rose sat down and ran her hand through the rippling water. Next to her, Feferi continued her little game of make-believe with the stuffed cuttlefish, which was now soaking wet and dripped water onto whatever surface it passed over. The girl couldn't have been younger than eighteen or twenty, but she acted like one a quarter of her age.

"Hello," Rose said, not sure how else to spark a conversation. The troll girl glanced up and gave her a wide grin, all fangs. Curly black locks of hair tumbled into her face over a golden circlet that matched the many chains and bangles looped around her neck and wrists; she had a pair of pink goggles strapped to her nose. Small bubbles clustered at the edges suggested that they were filled with water, which was hardly surprising, considering the two grey fins that sprouted out of the back of the girl's ears.

"Hi! I'm Feferi! Who are you? I haven't seen you before, so you must be new here! That's os exiting, I love new people! Do you like cuttlefish? This is Glub, here, hold him for me!" Before Rose could protest she found herself clutching the soaking plush, water dripping onto her skirt and causing the cloth to stick uncomfortably to her legs. Kanaya hadn't been kidding when she'd said that Feferi had "a bit of a hyperactive disorder." The girl spoke so quickly that it sounded as though her words were being run through a sound editor set on the x3 speed setting. Her voice was high-pitched, like someone who has been inhaling helium. Although, Rose thought, she wouldn't have been surprised if that was exactly what had been going on. A moment later she regretted the thought. Who was she to judge?

"Yes, I suppose cuttlefish are nice." If Feferi's grin had been any wider it would have split her face apart.

"Oh good! And fish too? I like fish! I get to go down to the front room and look at them sometimes, but they won't let me let them out." Her face fell a little, but quickly resumed its usual expression of sheer glee. "That's okay though, because they're really pretty no matter where they are, and also I have Glub and friends to keep me company. Oh, and the Squiddles too! Jade lets me have some of hers whenever she gets new ones!" Jade. Another familiar name from college. Ah, now she remembered: Jade Harley, the medical student with a penchant for the anthropomorphic and a love of all things plush and squiddly. What was a woman like her doing working at a place like this? No matter, she would think on it later.

"I have a hole in my stomach sometimes," Feferi suddenly said, her voice growing solemn. "I can stick my hand through it and poke my insides and it feels really funny, do you think that's a bad thing?" Rose looked at the nurse for confirmation, but the woman only shook her head and shrugged. It seemed she would have to unravel this herself.

"I - well, I don't know, to be honest. Where does this hole come from?" she asked, trying to sound sympathetic. Feferi's eyes grew wide and she grasped Rose's shirt, pulling her so close that their faces were nearly touching. Her breath stank of fish, though Rose was at a loss as to where she had gotten any. The teeth were a little too close for comfort, but Feferi's grip was strong and there was no way she would be able to wrest her shirt out of the troll's grip without ripping it or pulling both of them into the fountain. The nurse moved to aid her but Rose shook her head and indicated that she was fine and didn't mind terribly, which was a bit of a lie, but there was nothing for it.

"Can you keep a secret?" Feferi's voice dropped to a whisper.

"Yes."

"_He _did it." She pointed at the far corner of the yard, where the delusional scientist had returned to writing down things on his notepad. He appeared to be unperturbed by the bee stings, but every so often would slap at the air around him or at the sleeve of his shirt, as though crawling with invisible bugs. "Eridan did it. He put a hole in my stomach with a stick that glowed and shot lights everywhere. Not really, though, it was just in a dream. I think. But sometimes it comes back. It doesn't hurt though, it just makes my dress turn all funny colors. Because of my blood. It's pink." She paused for a moment, thinking. "You mustn't tell him I told you, otherwise he'll get mad at me. Promise?"

"Yes, I promise."

Feferi released her grip on Rose's shirt and sat bolt upright, grinning again. "Great! I know we'll be such good friends! I like people who can keep secrets!" She snatched the cuttlefish out of Rose's unresisting grip and returned to playing around with it in the water as though nothing had happened, laughing quietly to herself as if at some great joke. Rose was somewhat speechless. What if she wasn't the only one having strange visions? She felt better for a moment, but then remembered where she was. Almost everyone here probably had some sort of strange delusion or dream that troubled them. What did it matter if a crazy girl sometimes saw a hole in her stomach?

Regardless, her curiosity was piqued. She was tempted to try and speak to the scientist - Eridan, Feferi had called him - about what she had been told, but, almost as if she could read her mind, Feferi looked up at her and placed a finger on her lips. That was a no-go, then, at least as long as she was being watched.

Two other patients loitering around the base of a large oak tree caught her eye, a spindly, spidery troll in a blue jacket, and another with red glasses who was tapping her way around with a red-and-white cane and appeared to be laughing. The first was shouting angrily in Russian, her voice loud enough that Rose could catch a few of the words, _otvratitelʹno_, which from her lessons with her mother she knew meant "disgusting," and _Terezi. _It sounded like a name, presumably the blind woman's. She started over.

The Russian-speaking troll looked up as Rose approached and smiled, showing off fangs that resembled a spider's; one of her eyes had seven pupils, Rose noted, while the other had one. Eight eyes. She really _was _a spider. The other looked directly at her, sniffing the air.

"You are Rose Lalonde, am I right, yeah?" the first troll asked. _Spidertroll_, Rose thought. Her speech was stilted, though not because of her lack of grasp on the English language. She spoke every word with confidence and a pronounced cockiness that did not seem foreign at all. "I'm Vriska Serket, and this is Terezi Pyrope. I take it you heard my shouting earlier? I was telling her to stop the licking. It's disgusting and makes her look absolutely ridiculous." Eight words in every sentence, no more, no less, never slipping up. No doubt some form of severe OCD. There were also eight buttons on Vriska's jacket, eight beads on the silver necklace she wore, and her red sneakers had had extra holes cut into the sides to form two rows of eight eyelets through which the laces threaded.

"Why eight?" Rose hadn't meant to ask; the question had slipped out unbidden, and for a moment she worried that Vriska might take offense. Instead, she was surprised when the troll laughed.

"I get asked that all the time, really. It's easy, I like to keep things orderly. Bit difficult when it comes to wounds, though."

"Wounds?"

"You know, dorogoi*, on all of the bodies."

"I'm sorry, did you just say 'the bodies?" What in the world was this woman talking about? Before Vriska had a chance to answer her friend - if that was the right word - tapped her on the head with the cane and smirked, her tongue lolling out of her mouth like a dog's.

"Of course, she's a hardened criminal! Responsible for eight murders and they still won't let me lock her up _or _put her on trial. The people who work here are all idiots. I try to tell them that I'm a qualified attorney, judge, and jury but they don't listen! Your clothes smell delicious, by the way. I love grapes." Terezi laughed, a high, wheezing sound that reminded Rose of a hyena's cackle. She didn't quite understand the troll's final comment. Her clothes smelled nothing like grapes, she was certain of it. Unless she was smelling the _colors_? It was a reasonable explanation, she supposed, since Terezi was quite obviously blind; it was apparent in the way she could look right at something but still not seem to really be seeing it. Some form of synesthesia**, probably. But hardly the sort of thing the land one in a mental hospital. She decided not to press the issue, not wanting to accidentally offend, though considering Vriska's reaction to her query it was unlikely.

Best not to press her luck, though.

"You have a funny name, Rose," Terezi continued. "Maybe you should take your parents to court for giving it to you."

"That's a rather odd thing to say," Rose responded. "It can hardly be a stranger name than Terezi."

"You're _chelovek, _human, of course it sounds strange," Vriska retorted, rolling her eyes. With one of the pupils distorted as it was, the effect was rather lucid. "But enough of that, why are you here? By which I mean, what is your problem?"

"I don't particularly want to talk about it." To be fair, Vriska _had _been open enough about her own problems (although Rose was still unsure whether the comment about the bodies had been serious or not), but Rose was reluctant to reveal her dreams to anyone other than Doctor Egbert and Kanaya. Vriska shrugged.

"No matter, it is not terribly _vazhnyi,_ important. Besides, you used eight words in that sentence! That forgives everything - well, most things, I guess. It's not bad, secrecy, though some things _need_ saying. Tell us your dreams, _nemnogo vyrosli_, little Rose." Rose was shocked. How could this girl know about her dreams? She was sure that she had not mentioned anything to anyone who might have told this woman, and surely Kanaya would never reveal her dreams to the other patients. "I see you are surprised, but that's normal. I see more than people think, lots more." She tapped her right glasses lens with a claw. "My spider's eye sees everything, even what's hidden. I can see into your mind, Rose Lalonde. There's an awful lot of darkness in there. Doesn't it bother you, the darkness being there? Doesn't it make you afraid of seeing things? Or perhaps you're afraid of what _I _see."

"Stop it."

"Or what, you'll send your nightmares to me?" Vriska had a wicked smile on her face now. She was enjoying these mind games, Rose could tell.

"Stop it!" There would be no help from Terezi. She had grown bored of the conversation, apparently used to bearing witness to Vriska's taunts, and had wandered towards the bed of flowers by which Sollux had been sitting earlier. The red carnations bloomed like drops of blood on a handkerchief, and if Terezi's face had been stuck any further into them she would have appeared headless. But this was only a small distraction from the topic at hand. Vriska had her hands on her hips and was tapping her foot impatiently in counts of eight.

"I want an answer, give it to me!" Rose shook her head. She wasn't going to give the troll any more fodder with which to torment her. She may as well leave now. She turned to do so, but suddenly her mind was gripped in what could have been described as a spider's web. Her legs refused to move and when she tried to move anything else it took a great deal of effort, like wading through a pool of molasses. Something in her brain tugged at her and forced her to turn around again to face Vriska. The troll's eyes were closed and she appeared to be concentrating very hard, muttering under her breath. Counts of eight, counts of eight, a slow and solemn beat, like a metronome.

Rose felt her eyes close against their will and suddenly she was falling towards a blue-and-white point of light in the distance while creatures writhed all about her, brushing her limbs with their slimy appendages. No. Not again. Not now, not in front of Vriska, who, she was sure, would find great enjoyment in seeing Rose fall into the quivering throes of the broodfester tongues - where had that phrase come from? It had simply appeared in her mind, as if placed there by an invisible magician. She remembered the look of intense concentration on Vriska's face, how she had said she could see everything - was Vriska looking into her _dreams? _How did someone even _do _that? And more importantly, how did you make it stop?

She was now closer to the light than she had ever been before, close enough to see the flaky white clouds that floated across its polished surface, the silver halos that stretched in unending arcs across the skies of Skaia. Rose didn't know where that word had come from either, only that she had heard it before somewhere. She knew that if only she could stop falling for a moment and set her mind straight she would be able to remember, but if anything her speed seemed to only increase, and a wind whose source she did not know roared in her ears. No, not roared. Whispered. The voices had returned and now, she realized, she could actually understand what they were saying:

_Hello again, Rose Lalonde, isn't your head interesting?_

These were not the voices she knew and had heard a thousand times before. This was Vriska's voice, Vriska's laugh bouncing about inside of her skull

"Get out of my head!" she shouted, or tried to shout, but no sound emerged from her lips.

_I wonder what will happen when you land. Will you be crushed into tiny little pieces? Is that what you think will happen then? Or maybe you'll simply squash, like a bug. You're a bug, Rose, caught in my web. _Within the confines of her brain Rose uttered a few choice phrases that would have earned her stern looks from her mother, even though she was twenty-six and well within her rights to say such things. She wasn't a teenager anymore, or the impressionable young girl that she had been at five. She wasn't going to let _anyone_ mess around in her head or her dreams, dark as they may have been.

_Let's get a closer look, how about that? _

And her speed increased again, and there was Skaia, growing ever closer, and there, directly in front of her was a great violet moon crawling with cities, and on the opposite side of the planet its twin, clad in golden tile and filigree. It moved so slowly, rotating in its eternal orbit, that there was time for Rose to pick out each individual spire on the tops of the buildings, to imagine every possibly way that the pointed architecture could skewer her like a kebab. Could she die in this dream? She had never done so before, in _any _dream, but _this _dream was not ordinary. Perhaps she could die here. Perhaps her consciousness would suddenly burst into pieces, leaving her real body a gibbering vegetable. No more Rose Lalonde.

She was suddenly terrified and pushed with all her might against the darkness, against the web that held her mind in check without consent. She could feel the ground beneath her feet, solid and real, the sunlight, beating down on her head - but why was she still falling?

_Oh dear, so terribly sorry to end this. But I'll be in trouble now, you know? They won't let me stick around anymore, spoilsports. And Maryam is so delightfully concerned about you. It's sickeningly sweet, but enough about that, Rose. Time to wake up, _dragotsennye, mechtal, providets sveta***.

Vriska was led back inside by the same guards who had come to fetch Sollux - it seemed to be a day for trouble - though she did not seem disappointed about this in the least. Rose felt as though she had been out for hours, though Kanaya had told her that it had been barely over two minutes. More than enough time for them to notice that Vriska had gotten up to her mind games again. You leaned to recognize the signs, after a while, and one of the nurses had realised it as soon as she saw Rose turn around against her will. But Vriska was a tough nut to crack, and though they attempted to break her control she held fast to Rose's mind like a barnacle to the bottom of a ship. Finally, she had let go, but with a look of satisfaction on her face that said she had gotten what she wanted.

Rose did not understand how what had happened had happened, or even why. Kanaya seemed lax to explain anymore, instead repeating the words, "You need to rest. I will explain tomorrow," as she led Rose back up to her room, though there was still half an hour left in the free time. Her conversations had not been as productive as Rose had hoped - and she still hadn't gotten to talk to anyone about anything important! Feferi had not seemed like the type of person to know the answers, and Vriska had distracted her with her OCD and hypnosis, if that was what it was. Surely it couldn't be anything else.

She had heard rumors of the psychic powers that some trolls possessed, but hadn't been entirely ready to believe it until now. Sollux had let off sparks in the yard and apparently controlled the direction of the bees; now Vriska could get inside her head and control her movements. There was no other explanation, unless the whole thing was some product of her imagination. She defied the idea and longed to accept it at the same time. Defiance meant that Vriska could be a lot more dangerous than she had revealed herself to be. If she could put Rose into a dreaming state, what else could she do? Suddenly the comment about the murders didn't seem to ludicrous anymore. Acceptance was both better, and worse. It would mean that none of this had happened and that she was safe from ravenous spidertrolls, but it would also mean that she was indeed mad.

Rose did not want to be mad.

This was the thought that danced through her head as she lay down on her lumpy bed (at Kanaya's insistence), the one that kept her from sleeping as the nurse had suggested, the one that stayed with her as the line of sunlight on her wall gradually sank lower and lower until the lights came on and it vanished completely. As she ate her dinner, chicken soup and bread, it seemed to turn the food tasteless as she swallowed it down, or maybe that was just the feeling of the institution that reassured itself behind every spoonful of broth and half-cooked vegetables.

After dinner she leaned against the wall, declining Kanaya's offer to come and watch television with the other patients, and studied the newspaper clipping, wondering.

Until at last, she fell asleep.

...

*Darling

**For those of you who don't know what synesthesia is: it's a condition in which two parts of the brain overlap; for instance, the part that can see color and the part that smells or tastes - in Terezi's case, that is. You end up getting people for whom music has color, feelings have sound,_ et cetera._ I myself actually have one type of synesthesia, so I see letters and numbers in various colors.

***_dragotsennye mechtal providets sveta_ means something along the lines of "darling, dreaming Seer of Light."


	4. Chapter 4

Ho yay, here we go mystery deepens!

Homestuck belongs to Andrew Hussie.

...

Rose Lalonde dreamed.

She dreamed that she floated above the violet city once again and that great white letters hovered in front of her eyes, several stories tall. She had to lean back and crane her neck to make out the vast and curling letters, though when she did her understanding of them was relatively the same. _Derse. _What did it mean? If this was a _proper _dream - and she assumed that it was, for there were no voices or writhing beats grabbing at her clothes - then why did she not automatically find herself knowing what significance the word carried? Before her ordinary dreams had dwindled into to nothing more than a memory, she had found herself in worlds where she understood everything, even things that should not have been understandable. This was different. This was new and not like anything she had yet to experience.

As the letters passed on and the shadows that they cast went to darken somebody else's day, she noticed that she was warning strange clothes, a set of pyjamas the same colour as the city below, emblazoned with a moon on the front. It was hardly the strangest thing to have happened to her in a dream, so she dismissed it as nothing. Gazing upwards gave her no indication as to where she might be. The space was black and starless and - familiar? She glanced down at the city again, letting her eyes roam along the dim outlines of the streets, the upward swoops of the towers that ended in sharp points. Points that, she realised, she had been plunging towards earlier today. Did this mean that her dream was all Vriska's fault? It was a possibility, but she still wasn't entirely sure. As much as she now mistrusted the spidertroll, she mistrusted her own mind less.

Derse moved slowly beneath her feet, swinging around in circular arcs and bringing into a view a small moon that had been chained to the city with a stand of thick links. Twin towers stood up out of the collection of twisted buildings, and as Rose stared she realised that the light playing upon her face came not from the light of the city, which gave off only a dark, almost ultraviolet glow, or from some far-off star, but from the great blue planet that loomed behind the violet moon, its surface ringed with clouds and silver halos.

Skaia.

She had arrived at the place that John had spoken of, the place that the Dersites believed in. Dersites. Derse. Had those people _lived _here? Here on this moon? Rose wondered if the inhabitants of this place were as colourful as their home, but the thought struck her as silly, almost juvenile, and she ignored it. She seemed to be ignoring a lot of her thoughts these days, but did it really matter in the end? She hadn't done any good, solid thinking since she had stopped working, which had been a couple of weeks ago. That is to say, she hadn't done any _practical _thinking. It was all psychoanalysis and parables now, dark dreams and days that didn't seem to hold anything other than reminders of her fragile condition. Maybe now was a good time to stop all of that, to focus on other things. Disproving her theory about the Dersites, for one thing. That would be a good start, even if this was all just a dream.

Rose floated downwards, not making any motions with her arms or kicking at the air, merely directing her movements with her thoughts. This wasn't water, and anyone who tried to swim in the air was either a child or an idiot. She did not want to think of herself as either, though perhaps her mother considered her the first. A child. As if! She was well into her twenties and fully independent. She could think for herself and didn't need anyone holding her hand or handing out patronising explanations as to how the world worked in all of its infinite mysteries. She was, and she felt a glimmer of pride at the thought, her own person. And she did not swim in space. Or anywhere, for that matter, but that was not important at the moment. She never knew when she might wake up, and she wanted to use as much time as she had to explore and learn about this place.

Practical thinking, that was the key. If she could stick to it then she might just be able to get herself out of the mess she was in.

The streets of Derse were eerily empty, but Rose landed in a secluded corner and crept about at the edges of the shadows just the same. She was afraid that her powers of flight might suddenly decide to abandon her, and if they did so then she wanted her feet planted firmly on the ground, not hovering a hundred feet above it. Falling in a dream usually meant death and awakening, neither of which seemed particularly appealing at the moment. Death was a no-brainer. It wouldn't hurt, but it meant sitting bolt upright in bed while your heart pounded and you gasped with fear. Awakening would have been welcome, on any other day - with any other dream - but this was fascinating to her, and, dared she admit it, almost a little bit fun. It had been a while since she had had any fun.

She left the alley she had been investigating and walked down a long road towards an open square. An obelisk jutted into the sky from its centre and the buildings surrounding it seemed more political than residential. It reminded her of a trip she had taken to Washington D.C. with her mother one summer break, all smooth marble and columns, though there was no greenery here, not even the smallest flower bed or decorated parkway. Maybe "greenery" wasn't the right word for it. "Violetry," perhaps. Rose sighed. There she went again with the frivolous thinking. And about the colour of the plants on a dream planet, of all things. Her earlier question about the colour of the citizens wasn't on quite the same wavelength, and three seconds later, it was answered.

A small black figure in brightly coloured garb and a hat almost twice the size of itself was strutting towards the yawning gap between tow of the columns on the building directly in front of her. It was carrying a bundle of papers and Rose thought she detected a faint whistling coming from the creature's general direction. For a moment she wondered if the colour was due to the odd lighting of the place, but as she drew a little closer she saw that the creature's skin was as black as the sky above and glittered like an insect carapace. It's feet clicked on the violet cobblestones like a beetle's legs, reinforcing this theory. Fascinating. Rose considered calling out to the creature - the Dersite, she reminded herself - but wondered if perhaps it might become frightened of her, a newcomer to this place. No. If she didn't try then how could she know if she would fail?

Before she could shout she was interrupted by an almost-invisible purple streak that shot like a bullet through the square and tackled the tiny Dersite, who seemed to either shriek in pain or squeal with delight. Regardless, Rose suddenly found herself racing forwards, determined to either save the poor creature or acquaint herself with it and the second figure. As she drew nearer she saw that the latter was a girl like her, with long black hair cascading down her back and the same violet outfit. Then she spotted the pair of rams horns curling out of her skull and realised her mistake. Not a girl - a troll. A troll who suddenly stiffened and turned around with an almost deliberating slowness to stare at Rose. A troll who looked remarkably familiar.

"Aradia." Rose breathed. What was she doing here? Wasn't she dead? Before she could ask anything Aradia's eyes widened and she bolted away again, the small Dersite trailing after her in a series of small hops. "Wait!" Rose yelped, and tripped after the pair, sprinting across the square and down a long alley. The troll girl was faster than she had expected, and Rose quickly lost her quarry among the tangled sprawl of streets. A few other Dersites stuck their heads out and peered at her curiously, some whispering among themselves, but she had lost interest. Now all of her focus was fixated on answering the questions that burned in her mind, though she knew they would go unanswered despite her best attempts. She knew nothing about Aradia other than that she had supposedly died in a fire at the hospital. The information on the newspaper clipping was hardly going to explain what the troll was doing here.

Rose realized that she had been thinking of "here" as an actual, tangible place, not just some figment of her imagination. Of course it was perfectly reasonable to be dreaming about Aradia, what with all of her unanswered queries. She sighed and headed upwards along a tall flight of stairs and across a bridge that arced high above the city and was capped with flowering spirals. As she peered over the edge and into the square she had just come from she felt as though she was almost flying again, but also a lurch in her stomach, as though a large stone had suddenly dropped into it. It was an unusual sensation to feel in a dream, which so often garnered hardly any feelings at all save for the ones that were purely mental, or implied. You could always feel fear, or determination, or joy directly when you were dreaming, but there was never any heat or coolness, never any pain. If you stabbed yourself with a needle there would be nothing, but somehow you would _know _that it had hurt and react thusly.

The anxiety that Rose felt now, the roughness of the curves of the bridge that resolved itself under her fingers - this was more real than anything. She may as well have been awake.

"You are awake."

Rose gasped. Had she said that out loud? Whatever the case, she certainly hadn't been expecting an answer. She turned, half hoping that it would be Aradia who stood before her, but she was to be disappointed. Her accoster was a man who appeared about her own age and floated several feet above the ground. He wore the same costume as Rose, without the skirt, as well as a pair of sunglasses, which seemed unnecessary to Rose in the dim light of Derse. A katana dangled from his hand with dried blood coating the blade and she flinched. Was this where she died? Did her dream end now? She glanced around for anything that could be used as a weapon, but unless she now possessed the strength to tear a lamppost out of the ground and swing it around like a stick there was nothing she could do.

The man in the sunglasses seemed to sense her desperation. He raised an eyebrow. "Jegus, chill. This thing's for them, not for you. Do I look like the kind of guy who goes around stabbing defenceless ladies with a katana to you?" A pause. "On second thought, don't answer that. Anyways, it's totally cool, I'm not going to hurt you or anything, so you can stop flipping the fuck out in a completely obvious way and chill." Rose stared. The fact that he meant her no harm was relieving, but she was still stunned enough that when she tried to respond no sound came out.

The man continued: "I'm Dave Strider, by the way, here to offer you a variety of services which include the dispersion of information like it's fucking Christmas down in here, or stabbing anything that needs it. No sloppy makeouts or any weird shit like that, though. Not that you look like the type of girl to ask for that sort of thing, but just as a side note. Y'know, in case I need to use it as evidence in a court of law of something."

"Can you land? My neck is starting to hurt and I am afraid I might suddenly go into some sort of paralytic shock from the strain." Rose slapped herself inwardly as soon as the sentence had escaped from her lips. So much for making a good impression on someone who could be of potential use to her. "I'm sorry," she added, "That was somewhat rude of me. I should have introduced myself as well. I'm Rose. Rose Lalonde." Dave, now standing almost eye to eye with her, nodded.

"Yeah, I know. I've seen you sleepwalking out of your tower sometimes, so I figured it was only a matter of time before you showed up here at the hospital."

"Sleepwalking? And what did you mean when you said earlier that I was awake?"

"Well, not _awake _awake. I meant awake on Derse, which means you've got to be some kind of psychic or something wacky like that. So what's your deal?" The tone of the conversation had quickly dropped from semi-formal to not formal at all in any way, shape, or form. Rose shrugged and explained briefly about her strange dreams and what John had explained to her about going Grimdark. That wasn't to say that she believed any of it, but she figured that if Dave was going to be helping her he may as well know the whole story, even the bits that didn't seem totally, well, sane. When she voiced this bit as well he laughed.

"Sane? You're kidding me. What's that line? 'We're all mad here,' or something like that. From _Alice in Wonderland. _I swear, that cat is fucking trippy. My bro loves that Disney shit. I guess I sort of like it, but mostly I just watch it ironically. But anyways, if you're _here_ then I don't see how you can just drop Egbert's diagnosis and kick it into a corner like a mouldy potato," he added with relish. Rose wondered where he got all of his strange metaphors from, and then why it mattered anyways.

They had left the bridge and walked down a series of streets that Dave claimed led to the chain. When he had suggested flying instead Rose had declined, telling him that she wanted to get a better idea of the layout of the city. In reality, she liked the way that the buildings curved over their heads, masking the sky.

It made her feel safe.

Safe from what? She wasn't sure.

The chain was massive, and logic told her that something like that shouldn't - couldn't exist. _I am standing on a massive purple moon that orbits a planet from myth, _she told logic. _Don't tell me that a giant purple chain coming out of the ground is quite so hard to believe as all that. _

"How did it get here?" she asked. Dave shrugged.

"Hell if I know. What I do know is that it's pretty much impossible to cut - trust me, I tried, don't ask me why because I was kind of flipping my shit at that time - and that it holds Derse and its weird little sub-moon together. I woke up in one of the towers up there and I saw you wander out of the window of the other at some point." Rose frowned. Something was bothering her, something she couldn't quite place her finger on.

"Only two?" she asked.

"Yeah, why?" Now she knew what it was.

"Because earlier I saw a girl dressed like me running around in the courtyard. Doesn't she have a tower as well?" If Aradia had no tower then maybe she did not exist here at all and was just some wandering thought that had slipped into Rose's dream - although if Dave's explanation was anything to go by, this was hardly a dream. It was a whole other world where their minds would go when they slept. Things done in this world had meaning; even lasting effects. You could die in this world, and once you died you could never return to it, for then there would be no body for your mind to inhabit. No conversations, no flying, as she was doing now, upwards towards the base of the sub-moon and the pitch-coloured sky above it.

"I think we're the only two, although I don't know why the hell it's like that. Like I said, a couple of the other patients have dreamselves running around this place - especially the trolls, even the ones that aren't particularly the fortune-teller, I-hear-voices type. And don't even get me started on Prospit."

"Prospit?" Here was something new, something she had yet to hear of in either the waking world or in a dream. Dave groaned.

"I walked right into that one, didn't I. It's sort of a sister moon, except it's on the other side of Skaia and everything's all gaudy and gold-coloured. Don't see how the people over there fucking stand it, but it's not like it matters. The guys over here get a bit pissy if you mention it, though."

"Why?"

"Some kind of war going on, how should I know? There's no way I'm going to march right up to her royal bitchiness and ask what the hell is up with all the ships leaving for Skaia recently. She'd skewer me faster than you can say 'Well _excuse_ me, princess.'"

"Oh."

The end of the chain was surrounded by the tops of yet more buildings that were somehow inhabitable despite looking as though anyone attempting to live in them would tumble to the ground of the true moon far below as soon as they stepped out of the door. Gravity, it seemed, had stopped caring that it would not exist on a moon this small, allowing the citizens of Derse to walk about without a care in the world. Rose spared only a glance and flew towards the towers, grazing herself on a bell tower that defied all architectural possibility. A few scratches and holes in her clothing was all that came of it, so what did it matter? Peering through the wide window on the left tower, she saw a room that must have been Dave's. The bed was rumpled and unmade, and a pair of turntables sat in the corner, though she was at a loss as to how he had acquired them in this place. Derse did not seem like the ideal place to find all things technical and music-related.

The room in the second tower was far neater, but perhaps that was only because there was nothing in it to create a mess. The bed here was also unmade, but that was only because she had never known that there was a bed here to make, and sleepwalkers hardly possessed the skills to do such menial tasks.

Somewhere in the heavens something seemed to stir, and Rose backed away from her window, staring up at the void. Dave, floating some feet below, made a few disparaging noises. "Yeah, this isn't the best time to get distracted by the pretty lights. That is, if there were any pretty lights to be distracted by. Basically, stop staring at the fucking Furthest Ring, because then you're going to wander off to Gog knows where and when you fall asleep I'm going to go and drag you back here, which sucks. You owe me big time, Lalonde." He may as well have been a fly buzzing on the metaphorical windowsill for all Rose heard. The call of the Horrorterrors was far louder, though it made no sound, and far stronger, though there was no order in their wordless cries.

She rose and Derse receded behind her, Dave's cries growing fainter and fainter until she could hardly hear them at all.

The Furthest Ring rippled in the sky before her and the Horrorterrors sang.

They sang of their coming and of the end of all things and Rose watched and listened. She did not know whether or not she should be afraid. She knew that certainly she had been so before. She did not know what had changed. She...she did not want to accept this.

"Stop!" she screamed, but the voices continued, growing in volume and reverberating throughout the universe. Now she had come to her senses. Now she wanted to curl up into a little ball and shut her ears until she woke up from this mad dream of hers. Rose turned and looked for Derse so that she knew she had somewhere to flee to, but the moon was gone; there was only the tiny dot of Skaia and she wondered how she could have come so far in so little time.

"It's okay," said a voice, and she felt hands grip her shoulders and rotate her back towards the myriad spaces. It was a familiar voice, high and sweet, and reminded her of fountains and cuttlefish.

"Feferi?" The troll grinned and did a flip in the air. If she heard the Horrorterrors she was unperturbed by the sound, or perhaps she simply knew how to hide her fear. Her clothes seemed somehow differrent from everyone elses, and Rose realised that the front was marred with a large magenta stain. Where had it come from?

"Yes, I'm here! Don't be afraid of them, Rose, they just want to help! I want to help, too, but I can only be here for a little while before my dream bubble moves on. It's going through all of my memories, see? And I didn't want to watch this one because I've seen it before and because it makes me sad, so I came to talk to you instead!" The dream Feferi sounded so much saner than the real one. Her speech was slowed and, while Rose still did not understand entirely what she was talking about, it was somewhat comforting to have someone here with her.

"What do you mean, help? They've been giving me nightmares! If that's what their idea of help is then I don't want it! How can I make them go away? And why is there a stain on your chest? What do you mean you can only stay here for a little while? Why?"

"I can't answer any of your questions right now, Rose! They won't let me! But I can tell you why I'm covered in blood if you like!"

"Blood? What? Why?"

Feferi smiled even wider, showing off her fangs, and Rose noticed that the troll's eyes were empty of emotion - blank, white orbs that stared soullessly at her from their sockets. "_Because,_ stupid, I'm _de-ead_."

...

This is probably the only time I'll use an actual line from the comic, aside from things like "Bluh bluh" and "Stupid, stupid dumb."


	5. Chapter 5

I might be taking a break from this fic after this chapter and working a bit more on Mansionstuck, so if there aren't any updates for a while, don't worry. I haven't died horribly or anything like that.

Homestuck belongs to Andrew Hussie

...

The second time that Rose awoke it was for real, to sunlight streaming through the window and pooling against the edge of her bed. She lay on her back for a moment and stared at the ceiling, noting that it did not resemble that of her bedroom at home at all. Then she remembered where she was and sighed. The air in the room felt cold and musty and she considered sinking back underneath the covers and pretending that none of yesterday had happened, but what would be the point? What had happened had happened, and maybe today would be better and maybe it would be worse, but the important thing was that she didn't let any of it get her down. She knew better now, knew to avoid Vriska and her mind games, knew not to mention her dreams except to people that mattered.

Except she _hadn't _mentioned her dreams to Vriska. The troll had instinctively known and then exploited that weakness, though what she was after Rose could only guess at. There was nothing inside her head except darkness and memories of the life she had so recently used to have. Hardly interesting material, and if even she couldn't make sense of most of it, then how could someone who barely knew her do so? Not like it mattered. She did not intend to see Vriska again.

There was something she was forgetting. Something that had to do with her dreams. Had she dreamed last night? She felt sure that she had, though when she tried to remember it came to her slowly, as though the thoughts were being dragged through the primordial ooze that sat in the very bottom of her mind, the part that all humans have whether they are aware of it or not. This is the part that holds the time that we have never seen, the part that is the root of our most basic fears and emotions. The part where dreams come from, though scientists all deny it. They are afraid of what they cannot explain.

She remembered very little, only snatches that when pieced together only told a small part of the story. It was like watching a movie on fast-forward with parts of the film reel cut out. Scenes skipped heedlessly from one place to another and the viewer could only guess at what had happened in between, at what gave these events their special significance, or if they had any at all. In her minds eye she saw a violet moon drifting slowly above a blue world ringed with clouds and silver halos. She saw great letters floating in the sky. _Derse. Skaia. _She remembered flying, remembered a tower - no, two towers - one filled with things whose meanings she did not understand, and one empty of anything save for an unmade bed. There was someone she had spoken to, someone who had told her something important, but when she tried to recall a face or a name she found nothing.

_Aradia. _Yes, she had been there too! And there had been a small black creature that she had chased down the long streets. Then later, though she did not know how much later, she had flown away because something had been calling her. Calling her...

"Good morning, Rose!" Rose started as Kanaya drifted through the doorway carrying a blue plastic tray with what must have been breakfast, and a syringe like the one she had seen the day before, the one the troll had used for drawing blood. "Did you sleep well? You seem somewhat perturbed - did your dreams return to haunt you?" She was so nonchalant about the way she said it, as though she dealt with this sort of thing every day, as though she did not expect that the dreams held any significance, a significance that Rose was sure existed. If only she could place her finger on it. There was another view to Kanaya's cheeriness, the darker part of Rose's mind surmised. She could be fully aware of what was going on in Rose's head and trying to hide her knowledge of it with this patchy mask.

Rose shook her head, both answering the question posed to her and dispersing her own doubts. She hadn't even been here for a full day; this was no time to start becoming suspicious of the people around her. Suspicious could wait. For now she would merely hand out pointed inquiries, and if her questions were not answered to her satisfaction, then she would find another way of getting answers. There was always another way. Or rather, there usually was. Rose was not known for her optimism but she tried to discard the prickly, doubting thoughts and look on the bright side of things.

"Yes, I slept well enough. Another blood sample, I take it?" she asked as Kanaya set down the tray on the dresser and stuck the needle into her unresisting arm with the same precise procedures as before. Over the trolls' shoulder she caught a glimpse of what looked like scrambled eggs and the curling copper-colored edges of a piece of bacon sitting on the plate. Kanaya nodded.

"Yes, they thought there was something strange about the blood cell count in the sample we took. I've been told to take another so that we can be sure it was not a one-time occurrence." Like the last time, the explanation seemed reasonable, but Rose could not help but feel that there was something off about it.

"Really?" she asked.

"Yes." But there was a pause right before Kanaya answered, so slight that if one had not been looking for it then they would not have noticed it at all. But Rose did. And she also saw the subtle twitch of Kanaya's fingers as she removed the needle from the vein, the sort of nervous tic that everyone has, one way or another. The sort of tic that reveals when they are lying. And Kanaya _was_ lying, Rose was sure of it. But why? Was there something so drastically wrong with her blood that she could not be informed? Or was there something else at work here? It would do no good to ask, since Kanaya would no doubt disregard her questions and try to change the subject. She would turn to a more amiable source of information, she decided. Dr. Egbert, perhaps, who seemed so willing to share. After all, he had told her the Derse legend despite how ridiculous it seemed. If something was happening that concerned her person, he would tell her. Wouldn't he?

"Normally you would eat breakfast, as well as your other meals, in the cafeteria with most of the patients, but I thought that after your unsightly experiences yesterday you would prefer to dine alone." Rose nodded and accepted the plate of food Kanaya handed her. She had never been too fond of crowds anyways, but it would doubtlessly be inconvenient if she were to continue to hold all her meals in her room. She expressed this thought to Kanaya, who shook her head. "Not at all. There are several other patients on this floor who dine alone as well, for various reasons."

"Would these be the patients who should be marked with a 'does-not-play-well-with-others' sticker?" she asked, swallowing down a forkful of eggs and then gasping as they burned the back of her throat.

"If you like, yes. Now, I have to go and return this blood sample to the lab, but I will be back shortly to collect your dishes."

"Why you?" Rose suddenly asked.

"Sorry?"

"Why you? I don't mean to be rude, and it's not that I don't appreciate what you have been doing for me, but why go to all this trouble? Aren't there other people who could do the work as well?" Her mother would have scolded her if she had been around, Rose thought. She had always said that if you were sitting pretty then you shouldn't say or do anything that might take the chair away, which was, in effect, what Rose had just done.

"I..." Kanaya started to answer but then clamped her lips shut and slipped out the door. "I'll be back later," Rose heard her say, her voice muffled through the wood. To take a line from a certain book, curiouser and curiouser. It was the only thing that seemed to describe her situation, though this place was hardly Wonderland, and she was no Alice.

But hadn't there been something about that in her dream last night? Yes, she was sure of it now, though she couldn't recall for the life of her what it had been. Somehow cats seemed to be predominantly involved, but the only cat she could think of at the moment was Jaspers. Her mother had offered to take care of her daughter's darling pet, and Rose wondered how he was doing; if he was getting fed often enough - she knew how forgetful her mother could be when it came to animals; if he missed her. It was odd, to think of a cat missing its owner. With dogs you could easily imagine them standing at the gate and mournfully waiting for their beloved master or mistress to return. It was difficult to picture a cat doing the same thing. Sitting at the window, perhaps, and watching the traffic pass, but missing? The cats she had known couldn't have cared less, so long as they got their food and a place to sleep.

She wished he could have accompanied her on this journey, but even Alice had left her cat behind when she had fallen into that mad place.

Maybe she was an Alice of a sort after all.

Alice or not, she had a breakfast to eat.

Kanaya returned posthumously to take away the plates, as she had promised, though she brought with her an air of tension that Rose had not felt before in the nurse's presence. She had always seemed so easygoing, but now that manner had been replaced with one that felt more detached and aloof. Rose wondered if this change was her fault, because of what she had said. If something else had happened with another patient then that may have been just as bad. She suddenly felt a stab of pity for the troll. This was a mental hospital, hardly the ideal place to find company, or at least someone who could carry on a conversation without slipping into delirium at least once in a while. And then she came, her, Rose Lalonde, a woman perfectly capable of behaving like a normal human being. Ideal company in a lonely place like this, and then she had gone and rejected Kanaya, if that was a way to describe it.

Rose felt an apology was necessary. "I'm sorry," she said, standing and looking Kanaya in the eye. "For what I said to you earlier. Even if the change in your manner isn't my fault then I am still sorry, for whatever happened." Kanaya was silent and Rose noticed that her eyes seemed watery, the skin around them puffed and her cheeks glistening with half-dried tear tracks. Had she been crying? Rose was now certain that whatever had happened, it was not her fault. She knew that she could be caustic with her words, but doubted that even she could bring someone as strong as Kanaya to tears.

The troll hiccuped and tried to say something, but a sob choked out instead and before Rose could respond Kanaya had buried her face in her shoulder, her shoulders heaving. She had never seen a troll cry, or even been there when any of her few friends became weepy, and had no idea what to do with herself. For a start, she supposed, a hug would have to do, and awkwardly wrapped her arms around Kanaya's slim and shaking frame. It seemed to help, for after a few minutes Kanaya stopped and pulled herself back up to her full height. The two stood and stared at each other for a few seconds before Rose realized she was still holding the troll and let her arms drop, trying not to turn red from embarrassment. She really was not used to this sort of thing at all.

"Thank you," Kanaya said, her voice hoarse. "I'm sorry if I...that is to say...when I went downstairs I found out that one of my very dear friends had just died, and I had known them for years, and I just couldn't keep myself in check. We are not used to being so open with the stronger emotions as humans. In our society it is believed to display weakness. I didn't want to-oh, but what does it matter. I think I am feeling a bit better now." When she finished her explanation her voice was stronger. If you didn't listen too closely it would have been almost impossible to tell that Kanaya had been crying. She managed a small smile.

"Why did you come here, then?" Rose asked.

"Because I needed...someone and I did not think that you would mind very much or judge me. I do not have many human friends, so having you around is...relieveing." Something about Kanaya's word choice seemed odd, but Rose decided not to press it.

"Does this mean we're friends, then?"

"If you like."

"All right." The two stood in mutual silence, though this time there was nothing awkward about it. It was a silence to remember the one who had died, though Rose had never known them, and to consider the possibilities that the future might now hold. _Friends. _It was not a word that Rose had expected to hear from someone in this hospital, but it made her glad. "So, as a friend," she continued, "Do you mind telling me what it was that you found in my blood earlier before? I know it's a rather drastic and sudden subject change, but I can't help but mentioned the blood cell count?"

"Your white blood cell count was a little bit lower than normal, that's all." But there was that pause again, and that subtle twitch of the fingers. Rose sighed.

"Very well. Now, if you don't mind, could you direct me to the lavatories?" Another drastic drop in the level of seriousness that the conversation had held, but it was a necessary evil. "I assume that there is not too much of a need for you to accompany me?"

"Down the hall and take two rights; and no, that will be quite unnecessary." The women laughed and went their opposite ways, Kanaya down the stairs carrying the tray and Rose down the hall. She glanced through the windows of the rooms she passed, taking in a few of the familiar faces - and nervously skirted Vriska's room, though the troll did not seem to notice her - and then when she turned the corner a few unfamiliar faces as well; in one room a young troll sat in a wheelchair talking to thin air. Rose heard him address his invisible friend as "Rufio" ; in the room next to it a gangly troll with twisting horns and a tangled mass of hair tried and failed to juggle a set of colourful clubs, only to have them his the ceiling and bounce back down onto his head. When he looked up and saw Rose he waved, and without warning his innocent manner dropped and a vicious grin slashed across his face. Rose backed away, startled, and almost bumped into someone who had been walking down the hall.

"Hey, watch-oh, it's you." She turned to see a man in a red jacket and a pair of sunglasses pushing a dirty plastic cleaning cart and leaning nonchalantly on a broom. "I was wondering when I'd run into you."

Rose frowned. "I'm sorry, do I know you?"

The man looked puzzled for a moment, then sighed. "Great, so you're on of _those _types, the ones who forget every single Gog-damned thing right after they wake up. Maybe I can jog your memory a bit. Dave Strider? We met on Derse? You were an idiot and flew away to have a nice little chat with the Horrerterrors?"

"I don't-"

"I had a katana and you thought I was going to kill you, except I didn't and somehow ended up making stupid-ass references to _Alice in Wonderland_. I may have also mentioned potatoes, but let's not go there. I mean, I don't even like potatoes, which is probably why my bro makes them for dinner all the time, to get my Earth goat." Dave paused. "There I go again, saying shit that doesn't make sense. It's all this troll-speak, it's rubbing off on me."

Now that Rose thought about it, maybe there was something familiar about this man, about Dave. Some of the things he said rang true, though she did not fully understand why. _Derse_ she understood. _Horrorterrors_ made sense to her as well. It was perhaps for the better that she could not fully recall most of the things he mentioned, since no doubt they would only serve to confuse her more. She shook her head. "I'm sorry, I really don't recall. I do understand what you mean when you say Derse and Horrorterrors, but how you know about those things I'm at a loss to explain. "

"I'm the janitor, it's my job to know this shit. You know, so I can drop vague-as-hell hints about whatever the fuck decides to be the topic of the day, or the topic of the conversation in whatever room Rose Lalonde decides to walk into," Dave said, rolling his eyes sardonically, as though the points he was making were obvious.

"How do you know my name?" Rose demanded.

"You told me. Last night."

"That's ridiculous. You probably got it from one of the doctors, or maybe Kanaya told you."

Dave shook his head. "I swear on some ridiculously valuable object that I'm not lying, and I'm not some crazy who managed to wander out of his room and steal the janitor's shit either. So you're not going to turn the corner and find an unconscious body slumped against the wall or anything like that, if that's what you're thinking. Now if you'll excuse me, I've got a bunch of stuff to do. You know, top-secret janitor stuff. Cleaning up radioactive spills in the secret sub-basement and feeding the mutated chimpanzees and that sort of thing. Nice meeting you again, Rose. Hopefully you won't think I'm fucking insane next time we meet."

The janitor shouldered his broom and wheeled his cart away down the hall, vanishing around the corner. There was an intense rattling as the cart shuddered down the stairs, which gradually faded away into silence. Rose stood in the middle of the hallway and stared, blinking periodically. That had certainly been an interesting experience. Some part of her subconscious had recognized Dave, but as to how and why she did not know. The mystery deepened more and more with every passing hour that she spent here; now here was another for her to solve - the connection between the janitor and her dreams. There didn't _seem_ to be anything abnormal about him, anything that should have set the alarm bells in Rose's head to ringing, anything that might suggest some sort of relevance.

Crackpot theories and ridiculous hypothesis conjured up by a Rose Lalonde: a lot.

Actual facts: None, unless you counted the newspaper clipping and Aradia's ghost, but the dead girl was a flighty as a sparrow and had spoken as much as one.

_Come. _

The voice rang suddenly in her mind, and she snapped to attention, fearing that somehow Vriska had crept up upon her and was aiming to play another round of mind games. Then she realised that Vriska never spoke in single-worded statements, her OCD directing her words otherwise. The tone of the mental voice was different as well, more a request than a command. But where had it come from?

Down the hall she glimpsed the now-familiar translucent form of Aradia slipping around the corner. A trip to the lavatory would have to wait, rules be damned. If she lost this chance she might never find it again. Rose darted quickly around the corner and down the hall, following her quarry through a door marked "maintenance," which had been conveniently unlocked, and down several flights of stairs. The air took on a dank and musty smell and mold grew in the corners of the ceiling and the wooden lining between the floor and the walls. Pipes jutted out of the walls and snaked across the ceiling to the other side in a twisting maze. Below, Rose watched Aradia pass through a second door. It was painted black and unmarked. The whole thing reeked of danger.

What choice did Rose have but to stop through?


	6. Chapter 6

Oh look, I'm not dead.

Insert the obligatory disclaimer here.

...

Darkness.

For a moment Rose panicked, fearing another of her visions, but the blackness before her remained still and blessedly free of horrorterrors and their fetid moans. She reached cautiously towards the wall on her left and felt about for a light switch; her fingers felt only the peeling paint and crumbling plaster of an institution who has left parts of itself to moulder away without care. The wall to her right held what she was looking for, and as she flipped the switch a single bulb flickered into life, chasing away the dark until it crouched in the corners, little lurking shadows waiting for a chance to grow. It dangled nakedly from a slim wire that looked frayed at the ends, and Rose hoped that it would not suddenly disconnect in an inhumorous twist of fate and prevent her from progressing further after her elusive spirit. There was always the option of turning back and seeking a flashlight or lantern, though the former was the more likely choice in this modern age, but she doubted that such a tool would be as easy to lay her hands on as she hoped. No doubt she would be found and questions would be asked, queries that she did not want to answer. Ghosts were not for those who claimed to still reside in the realms of sanity. That was not to say that she no longer did; she was beginning to think of herself as being on the threshold between the two, one foot on either side of the door. She did not yet know which side she would be on when the door chose to shut.

And there was another thought, pressing itself through the rest of her muddled musings: that she would close the door herself.

But those fictional doors were not of importance now. Rose turned and quietly shut the one behind her, hoping that she would not accidentally lock herself in. She tested the knob and opened and shut the door again several times until she was satisfied that she would not be trapped in this dim hallway.

The walls were painted a ghastly salmon color in some places and a sickly yellow-green in others, the paint peeling away and pockmarking the wall with unsavory white splotches of plaster. Near the floor small black spots of mold crept their way towards the ceiling like a line of ants; the whole place had the smell of dampness and decay. It was the smell of old basements and wet cement and the thick earth that always sat in piles around construction sites, slowly drying in the sun. Slightly uncomfortable, but not altogether unpleasant. Rose might have even gone so far as to call it relaxing. It reminded her a little of the forest, of trees growing old and collapsing into piles of mulch and soggy leaves, decomposing among the rest of the green and growing things. It was an old smell. Whatever this place was that Aradia has led her to, it had not been cared for in a long time.

However, that did not mean that it was not frequented, and Rose had a suspicion of mysterious, unmarked doors that came, like many other things, from her choices of literature. She walked forwards, scanning the floor and walls for any objects or markings that might give her clues as to what this place had been used for - or was still used for - and why it appeared to merit such importance as to have a ghostly figure wandering down its halls. There were several scraps of paper pinned to a cracked corkboard, but the handwriting on them was faded and barely readable. Rose managed to make out what appeared to be names, most of them belonging to trolls, for she recognized the six-letter pattern almost immediately. What followed the names was more difficult to decipher: a series of numbers, and then some illegible scrawl that looked familiar. After squinting more closely at the pale letters she discerned it as being similar to Dr. Egbert's handwriting, but was not sure whether this merited him as a suspicious person or not. She decided to take no chances and mentally marked him down, feeling slightly silly for indulging in such sleuth-ish behaviors.

Moving onwards, she found a set of doors leading out of the hall, all also unmarked, but there the similarities ended, for they were all, to Rose's disappointment, locked. She kicked at one of them, as though such an action would miraculously cause the lock to give way as it did in the movies - the universe of crime thrillers seemed to have a penchant for poorly-made locks - but was unsuccessful. Hardly surprising. Past the doors, another set of stairs led down into the gloom. The light from the bulb behind her was giving off little light as it was, and Rose gazed about for another lightswitch. Her eyes settled on it sticking out of the wall a little ways into the stairwell, and she leaned forwards and flicked it on with the tips of her fingers. A second bare bulb came to life, looking as bedraggled as its predecessor. It was, Rose noted, one of the newer fluorescent bulbs, giving off a bright white light rather than a warm yellow glow. That meant that someone came down here to change the bulbs, which in turn meant that this place was in use, though what this use _was _Rose was at a loss to discern.

Down the stairs. The piping returned here, jutting out of the wall at angles that when viewed in a certain light appeared to defy the laws of Euclidean geometry, and occasionally dripping water tinted slightly orange with rust. While the connections between the pipes were damp and gritty, the rest had been newly painted and glistened icily. Someone had sloppily slapped on labels that marked a large red pipe as the main water supply, and several smaller white ones as chemical carriers, though it was not explicitly stated exactly what chemicals were being carried, or where to. Well, no matter, since she would presumably find out eventually. Besides, what were chemicals when she had something new to occupy her interest?

An IV stand had been shoved up against the wall in the corner of th stairwell, its bags dangling limply from transparent pipelines. They were empty, the insides of one coated with a thin, reddish-brown layer of liquid, and the other with a fluid that had the same substance as the other but was colored a deep blue. Rose leaned down and picked up the bags, scrutinizing them. They were identical in every respect but the contents, both clear and unmarked. Gingerly, she tugged the pipe out of the top of the reddish one with a quiet pop and sniffed.

Rust. Iron and rust was what she smelled, the same smell that rubbed off on her skin whenever she scraped herself deeply enough. The substance in the bag - or rather, the substance that had been in the bag - was human blood. She popped the other bag and performed the same test. There was no rust this time, only some sharpness to the air that she could not identify. She guessed that what this bag had held was blood of the troll variety. The question was, why? Kanaya had mentioned blood tests, but surely there could not be so much blood taken from the patients as this, not unless there were some who required transfusions, but Rose doubted it. This was a mental hospital, fully equipped to deal with patients whose mental stability was below par; not with more elaborate medical cases. No blood transfusions here.

More questions arose: why would there be two different blood types on the same IV stand? Why had the stand been abandoned here, in this stairwell, with its contents depleted? What was going on, and why was Aradia choosing to show it to her? As for answers, there was only none, none, and none. It was highly frustrating to be so close to discovering something as far as physical evidence went and yet at the same time being miles away where answers were concerned.

Rose sighed and stood, dropping the blood bags to the floor. She could collect them on her return if the need arose; no point in being burdened with unnecessary and peculiar objects.

The stairs ended after several dizzying revolutions around a central cement column, and a third lightswitch at the base lit up a small room with steel benches bolted to the floor in rows, and a blackboard to the far wall in some strange facsimile of a classroom. The board appeared freshly washed, but one corner remained undisturbed and Rose darted over to peer at the chalk markings. Though clearer, they were about as recognizable to her as Dr. Egbert's faded handwriting. The writer - or perhaps artist was a better word - had choppily outlined a sun with tendrils that branched out into empty space. Other symbols had also been sketched out, a large gear with thick cogs and a set of swirls that spiraled inwards towards each other. Diagrams accompanied the cryptic pictographs, boxes and arrows and statements that would have been legible had someone not taken the time to scribble wildly over the words, leaving the chalk tray below coated thinly with white dust. More clues. Even fewer answers than had been had before.

Rose picked up the chalk and attempted to add some of her own drawings to the board, long curling swathes of white transforming into crude tentacles that centered around bulbous heads and gaping beaks. She marked out the layout of Derse, the slanting walls of the towers and the long chain that had connected the large moon to its smaller twin. Then, with a small smile, she sketched a face that might have been Kanaya's, only to erase it with a sweep of her hand, leaving behind trailing smudges across the board. Behind her, something clicked.

She froze, the back of one hand still pressed to the blackboard. With the other, she tightened her grip on the chalk until it cracked into several smaller pieces and let out a small cloud of dust and slightly larger flecks. Rose turned slowly to face the door in the wall behind her and waited with bated breath as the clicking behind it continued, growing louder and louder and then suddenly fading away without warning. She shuddered with relief and wondered if it would be better to turn back and come back when there were no strange noises emanating from behind closed doors, when she might be the only inhabitant of this place. But at the same time, she wanted to go forward. She wanted to know - what was it that she wanted to know? She had followed Aradia here without really understanding why, without considering the possibility of such a venture. Perhaps it was a test of some sort, and she _needed _to go through that door, clicking or not.

A sudden feeling of anger overcame her. She was done being pushed around by voices and visions and spidery trolls who could get into your head. She was done being lied to, if she was being lied to at all, but one must always consider the possibilities. And she was done being frightened of clicking. She wasn't defenseless. Her mother had made her take several martial arts classes at a young age, and while she could not perfectly recall every motion of every form, she could still kick like an ass and had a mean right hook. The only thing that would stand in her way now was the bane of heroes everywhere: a locked door.

Thankfully, there wasn't one.

Still clutching the chalk in a hand that was rapidly beginning to feel rather dry, she turned the handle and peeked cautiously into the next room, steeling herself for whatever horrors might await her. She felt almost disappointed when she saw nothing more than what might have passed for some sort of operating room slash chemistry lab had it not been for the general state of the place and the vast amounts of steam issuing from the pipes. Along one wall she spotted the thin white chemical carriers from before, which led down into a series of long white tubes strung up with various other pipes and nozzles. Stains of multiple colors were splashed along the walls, and there were several IV stands in a corner, their bags full with a multitude of colored fluids. Most of them appeared to be blood. Then there was the operating table itself, polished, unmarked steel and leather pads covered with a white cloth that draped in languid folds down to the floor. Only a corner of the table was visible, shining softly in the light. More fluorescence, although here there were not bare bulbs but proper lights, lined up in neat rows along the ceiling. Despite their brightness the room still retained a brown tint to it.

Rose stepped in and glanced around. The room was deserted, although behind the white chemical tank it stretched back further than she would have guessed and she wondered what might be lurking among the dim silhouettes of pipes and streams of smoke. The source of the clicking was nowhere to be found, though she was unsure whether to be disappointed or relieved. She settled for a mixture of both, and sidled over to the blood bags for a closer look. They held all colors of the hemospectrum along with several pints of human red, and were cool to the touch, their edges lightly beaded with moisture. Perhaps they had just been removed from some sort of freezer? Yes, there it was in the corner, and upon opening it Rose discovered that it was full to bursting with yet more blood. She was not prone to flinching at gore, but even now could not help but flinch with revulsion.

"I cannot imagine," she said aloud, because there was no harm in doing so, "What the purpose of such quantities of blood could possibly be used for in a place like this. I suppose it is safe to assume that you would not have led me here if you didn't think it was important for me to be aware of this place's existence." She was speaking to Aradia now, though she did not know whether the ghost girl was present or off on some other venture already. "If you _are _listening," she added as an afterthought, "I don't suppose you would mind generating some other cryptic clues for my amusement?"

Not surprisingly, there was no reply.

Something moved in the shadows behind the chemical tubes. Something big.

Rose's breath caught in her throat and she dove towards the only hiding place she could think of: beneath the operating table, lifting the cloth and curling up against the leg of the table, trying to slow her breathing to the barest minimum. Wheels jittered unsteadily under her weight and she willed them to stop. Already she was regretting her choice. It would have been better to crouch down behind one of the large appliances, she surmised, where at least she would be able to see what or whoever was coming for her out of the dark.

A hulking shadow fell across the white expanse of cloth and she made out a pair of black boots through the crack between the edge of the cloth and the ground. The table rattled as something with a heavy weight was set down on it. Rose wondered what it could be. A body? She shook her head, attempting to rid herself of such morbid thoughts. Surely not. Still, she had wished for a scenario out of a psychological thriller, and her was one occurring right under - or over, as it were - her nose, and she was not enjoying it as much as she had expected. That, of course, was a silly thing in itself, since it was foolish to expect to enjoy any such scenarios no matter how peculiar your tastes were. There were probably some people somewhere who got off on this sort of thing, but Rose, with some satisfaction, did not count herself among them. It was better, she decided, to be terrified because at least then there was something that would help you survive. Arousal would only lead to making even stupider choices.

"Scalpel," a voice intoned thickly, just the sort of voice you would expect the owner of a large and hulking shadow to have.

"Scalpel!" a second voice squeaked, and there was a clatter of metal instruments on a tray.

"Forceps," the first voice said, though this time the solemnity seemed a bit strained.

"Forceps!"

"Cali-Nepeta, I must insist that we cease this foolish japery. We are employees of this esteemed establishment and are not being payed to lounge about playing make-believe with surgical tools," said the first voice with a heavy sigh. The metal instruments clattered and then made a muted clink as though they had been stuck heedlessly into a large pocket. "Now if you would be so good as to remove yourself from your position on my back and assist me in _professional _matters, I would be most grateful."

A giggle from the second speaker - Nepeta, was it? "Equius, you're always so furrmal! Anyways, you know they don't employ me, I live here like most everyone else, so I couldn't pawsibly get paid or anything like that." There was a soft pat and a second pair of feet appeared in the gap. These were bare, and the owner had let the nails grow out longer than what might be considered civilized, so that they resembled claws. Rose saw grey skin and realized that this Nepeta girl was a troll; no doubt her partner, Equius, was as well, judging by his size. Or rather, the size of his shadow, but that was about as close to a good look as Rose was going to get.

There was something familiar about one of the two, something she could not quite recall...there it was: Nepeta. One of the patients Kanaya had introduced her to on her first day at the hospital, a small girl in a large green coat and a thing for cats, or at least a thing for setting them on fire. Morality issues. That was it. What was she doing down here? Rose opened her mouth and was about to voice her thoughts aloud, but then remembered that she was hiding and would undoubtedly get into a great deal of trouble if she was discovered. As soon as she had stepped through that final door the situation had gone from mildly suspicious to potentially deadly. She wondered if she would be able to find the scalpel that had been mentioned and use it as a weapon if she was caught; of course, that assumed that the two trolls by the table would attempt to hurt her if they discovered her location. Equius had called himself an employee of the hospital, so perhaps that was all right, but she still didn't trust the pair. It was always the large ones who were dangerous. _And the small ones, _Rose added mentally. She was no cat, but that didn't mean that Nepeta wasn't capable of injuring her.

"So what are we doing now?" asked Nepeta, standing on tiptoe.

"I have explained the procedure to you multiple times. We are conducting tests in order to locate the Seer."

"Why? Does Doctor Egbert or Doctor Harley know?"

"I...no. This is at the request of an outside authority." Equius sounded flustered, as though he didn't like the idea of performing potentially illicit activities. _Seer_, Rose thought. Hadn't Dr. Egbert mentioned a Seer of some sort when discussing her case with her? It couldn't be a coincidence.

"Who?"

"He did not give his name."

"Oh. Okay." A pause. "Can I help?"

Rose felt her left leg beginning to cramp up and resisted the urge to stretch it. Despite Nepeta and Equius's banter, which had enough volume that she could allow herself to breathe a little more easily, moving would only cause the base of the operating table to shift and instantly give away her position. Could she make it to the door and out of this sub-basement if she had a head start? It was probably best not to dwell on it for too long, or else she would grow twitchy and never get anywhere at all, except perhaps the inside of a body bag.

Morbid thoughts. How delightfu-

Rose sneezed.

There was a deadly silence.

"Shit," she said.

And ran.

...

Aaaand the plot thickens!


	7. Chapter 7

In which holy shit there is a lot of exposition.

Homestuck belongs to Andrew Hussie.

...

When a person repeats a certain action for a set amount of time, the action becomes habitual, automatic. They find themselves able to repeat that action without exhausting any of their mental faculties to achieve it; after playing a certain song over and over again, a musician may find the motions of his hands on the keyboard or fingers on the strings done easily. It is as if the song plays itself. Rose's action, while not as fanciful as musical pursuits, was nonetheless practiced, and as she slid out from underneath the operating table and pulled herself to her feet she managed to sprint towards the door, spin around and grab the handle, and slam it shut without so much as batting a metaphorical eyelid. Years of absconding from arguments with her mother had prepared her well for this moment, though she never could have guessed that it was coming.

She looked for a lock and found none, at least none that was accessible to her from this side of the door, and tightened her grip on the knob as someone on the other side of the door gripped it and twisted it with tremendous force. She was powerless to resist the slow turning of the knob, and the metal left her hands feeling heated and sore as she pulled them away and ran towards the stairs, nearly tripping over a bench and landing face-first on the floor. In the several seconds of hesitation that came from that moment the door slammed open and Equius thundered into the room. She spared a glance over her shoulder and wished that she hadn't, for there was more precious seconds wasted as her brain processed the troll's appearance.

He was not, as she had originally thought, just large. Equius was _massive, _with hands the size of spades and heavyset shoulders. His hair was combed straight down in a greasy mass to his shoulders, his skin glistened with sweat, and his eyes were hidden behind a pair of cracked sunglasses. Nepeta peered curiously over his shoulder. She had her arms wrapped around his neck and was piggybacking. Rose wondered how the arrangement worked out. From what she knew of trolls, they weren't too big on the touchy-feely. The pair must have been moirails to allow for such close and familiar contact.

"What are you doing here?" Equius demanded, cracking his knuckles. Rose swallowed nervously and tried to back away towards the stairs without making it too obvious. "This level is for authorized personnel only." The long words sounded somehow awkward coming out of the troll's mouth, as though he was not sure whether he sounded formal enough in his speech or not. There was a slight blue flush to his cheeks. What was a highblood doing working in a place like this? Most of them were all the heads of large companies, or at the very least sitting pretty with some sort of management position. Rose wanted to ask, but felt that this wasn't exactly the best time to be asking questions about someone's personal life. She had apparently delayed too long in replying, because Equius's brown furrowed even deeper than it had been before as he said, "Answer the question, human, or will I have to resort to force?" From her position on his back, Nepeta giggled like a demented imp.

Rose decided to go for the honest-but-not approach. "You really wouldn't believe me if I told you," she said, trying to keep her voice calm and level.

"Really."

What could she say? That she had followed a strange ghost girl through an unmarked door without considering the implications? That she had thought doing so might help her discover something relating to her visions? That she was really quite curious as to why there were secret tests being conducted in an equally secret laboratory underneath the building without the knowledge of the two primary caretakers? They sounded akin to the ramblings of a madwoman, and, she realized with a jolt of discomfort, that was what she was. Mad. If not from her own perspective, then from the perspective of others, and in this world that was all that mattered. Even if you were capable of taking care of yourself and controlling yourself, if there was an inherent strangeness about you, if you babbled and talked of dreams that nobody could understand, they called you mad. They called you mad and locked you away. There were those who were, of course, locked away for their own good - because they were genuinely dangerous to themselves or to the general public - but there were also those who were locked away because people were afraid of something that they didn't understand.

Rose knew she couldn't blame the public for her own admission to this place. She had chosen to come, and in doing so had marked herself as an outcast and a madwoman among others like herself. It did not matter whether she claimed to be sane and spoke as rationally as she was able: the world would see her words as a half-baked truth concocted in the wavering passages of her mind.

"Yes," she finally said. "You wouldn't believe me, because even if what I say is the absolute truth, you will treat it as the ramblings of a madwoman. That being said, it doesn't matter what I tell you, so I may as well spill the facts: I am here because I followed the ghost of a girl who has not even been dead for a very long time, or so I have been led to believe, and because there was always a nagging feeling in the back of my mind that there was something suspicious about this place. Call it paranoia if you will, it does not matter. At any rate, it seems that I was right to be wary, judging from what I have now discovered."

"A ghost girl."

"Yes."

Was it just her imagination, or did Equius seem slightly anxious? "Do you...how long have you been seeing her?" the troll asked. The questions carried a professional air, or would have, if not for the prying undertones that accompanied them.

"Since I arrived."

"Do you know who she is?"

Rose frowned. "Why so many questions? What could possibly interest you so much about a dead girl who might only be a figment of my imagination?" Silence was her only answer. Even Nepeta's giggling had stopped, her eyes grown wide as she gazed at Equius with concern. She sighed. "Her name is Aradia."

The silence continued. Rose wondered if she could slink away, escape while Equius stood staring vacantly at the wall over her shoulder, apparently lost in thought. At last he said: "As I thought."

"Do you know her?" Rose demanded earnestly. Here was information ripe for the taking, facts that Kanaya had been so elusive in revealing.

"I did."

"And who was she?"

"I-we were told not to speak of it, we-" Equius stopped and blinked several times. When he finished he stared at Rose as if seeing her for the first time, and shook his head angrily. "But you are not supposed to be here. I presume you are capable of escorting yourself out, since you seem to have had no trouble in entering. Do not linger; I will check to make sure you have not hidden yourself somewhere." He cast a glance at the new drawings on the blackboard and mumbled something under his breath while Nepeta nodded earnestly. This subtle communication between the pair finished, Equius wheeled around and walked back through the door into the laboratory, shutting it firmly behind him. Rose heard the dim click of a lock, and when she slowly reached out to jiggle the knob she found it immovable. No more information here.

There was obviously come connection between Equius and Aradia. Perhaps they had been friends, lovers, or caught up in some other relationship whose subtle nuances she could not decipher. They could not have been coworkers, as Aradia had apparently been a patient here, and they could not have been relatives, due to the vast difference in blood caste. Regardless, it had obviously been of some importance, if not to the dead troll than certainly to the one still alive. She wondered if she should speak with Kanaya about this, and then how much time had passed. She had set out with the intent of utilizing the restroom, a process which would have taken a much shorter period of time than her current venture. She did not have a watch with which to gauge the passage of time but guessed that she must have been gone for at least ten minutes. More than enough to raise suspicious, especially if Kanaya had come to check on her and found her missing.

She quickly wheeled about and darted up the stairs, down the hall, and out the door, not bothering to flick the lights off as she left. Others could deal with that, there was no time to be bothered with such trivial details. The hallway was empty when she emerged, although the linoleum glistened with newfound polish, no doubt the work of the elusive janitor from before. Rose glanced in both directions and mentally rewound until she remembered Kanaya's directions, hurried off to do her business, and returned to her room with the hairs prickling on the back of her neck.

Kanaya was waiting for her when she walked in, sitting on the bed with a worried and slightly pensive expression on her face. The troll stood and her worry turned to anger as she grabbed Rose by the shoulders and shook her like a rag doll. "Where have you been?" she blustered. "You left to use the lavatory and return fifteen minutes later? I can understand that sometimes humans have difficulty with their bodily functions, but that difficulty must have been great indeed as you appeared to have deemed the toilet facilities unsatisfactory for your use. Where have you been?"

Rose stood stoically and attempted to regain her composure before answering. Kanaya's grip on her shoulders had not loosened, and she could feel the tips of the troll's claws digging into her skin through the fabric of her shirt. "I followed a ghost," she said simply. Kanaya's arms dropped and her expression morphed into one of disbelief.

"What?"

"You heard me correctly. I followed a ghost through an unmarked door and discovered some very interesting things about this facility. I do not suppose that you would know why there are large quantities of blood being kept in a freezer underneath the building, or why one of the patients is conducting experiments with a second and somewhat large employee?"

The silence in the room stretched to the point of breaking.

"Well?" Rose demanded.

Finally, Kanaya said, "You had better sit down."

Rose sidled over to the bed and sat as Kanaya took on the composure of a professor about to begin a lecture.

"This is the story of Aradia Medigo," she began.

"You may remember how on your first day here I gave you a tour and indirectly introduced you to several of the other patients on this floor. One of those was Aradia, although her introduction was even more indirect, as I believe I uttered it in the past tense. You inquired why she remained in the hospital if she was now sane, and I thought it was strange because I had said nothing to suggest that she had been cured, and because Aradia certainly did not remain in the hospital. I assumed it was a false assumption on your own part and continued to explain things to you as normal. Then, when we were returning to your room you asked where she had gone, she had only just been in her room a few moments ago. I put your query down to a side-effect of your visions and thought nothing much of it.

"You may be interested to know of her affliction. Now that I think about it, it was much the same as yours. When she entered into our care she complained of hearing voices and seeing strange visions. She said that the dead were speaking to her and that they never stopped. She said that she wanted to help them and to end their suffering, but that she could not because there was no time. I never quite understood what she meant by that, 'no time.'

" 'If they are already dead,' I told her, 'Then of course there is no time. They are all long gone.'

" 'No, they're not,' was her reply. 'They're still here and they speak to me and they want my help but I can't help them because there is no time.'

"She never specified what exactly there was no time _for_. Later I came to realize that she must have been speaking of herself, for only two months after her admittance here there was an accident. A terrible, terrible accident, one that involves far more than what you may have heard about in the news. Or perhaps you did not. The fire was only written about briefly in the column of the newspaper, and then forgotten about. There were no obituaries, no letters of regret to be posted, no requests sent out by the hospital for donations in order to repair the damage. Well, perhaps there were requests, but they were quiet and unobtrusive, unnoticed by most of the public. Nobody paid any mind to the fire at the mental institution so far away from town. Nobody cared about the death of a girl, one Aradia Medigo.

"I never saw the corpse, or whatever may have been left of it. They say she suffocated more than burned, and that when they found her she looked almost peaceful. I do not know if this was so because her voices had at last stopped, or for some other reason. Maybe she is with those voices now. I do not know.

"The paper never went into specifics about the cause of the fire, only that it was set by another patient, whose name they deigned to mention. I will tell it to you now: Sollux Captor, who was another whom you have met, both on the first day and later in the garden when explained to you about his way with the bees. Bipolar. We suspected that he possessed a small amount of psychic power, due to his unruly habit of periodically unleashing small bursts of energy from his eyes. Slightly shocking at first, but overall harmless. We were content to let him have his way with it and not give him any medicines that would dampen the effect so long as he was mature about it. He agreed, and things continued as normal. Occasionally there would be scorch marks on the walls of his bedroom during an uncontrolled fit of anger, but for the most part the power was controlled and, in effect, harmless.

"Here now is where a third and final player enters into this scenario, one you have also been introduced to, although not as pleasantly as you may have liked. Vriska Serket, and while I am not meant to form such opinions, she is a generally unpleasant person to be around. There is something off about her moral compass, and she delights in harassing the doctors and nurses and other patients. In some extreme cases she has even attempted to take control of one of them in order to escape. Luckily, she was unsuccessful.

"Now I will tell you events as they truly unfolded, and not in the scintillatingly brief words of the newspapers.

"Vriska and Aradia had always been slightly at odds. I suppose this could be put down to their opposing personalities. Vriska was always so controlling, while Aradia was content to let others do as they wished. She was, as she put it, okay with a great many things. One of the things she was _not _okay with was Vriska's treatment of people. There were words had between them, and they parted numerous times on a bad note. And one day - perhaps something was said that was harsher than before, perhaps Vriska was simply pushed over the edge - the fire happened.

"Sollux used to be roomed on the floor below. His room was located beneath Aradia's, and somehow Vriska succeeded in bending him to her will and forcing him to set the ceiling of his room on fire. We had always assumed that Sollux's powers were a minor thing, but now we saw that we had been wrong. His powers were devastatingly strong, and things began to burn almost immediately. Unfortunately, we became so preoccupied with evacuating the patients from that floor and around the room, as well as the floors below, apprehending Vriska before she could cause any more damage, and the like, that we neglected to notice the smoke seeping out from beneath Aradia's door.

"She was always such a quiet girl, except when her fits came to her, and this time was no different. She did not so much as cry out for help, and by the time she was found it was already too late.

"We attempted to have Vriska moved to another hospital, but were unable to do so due to a lack of space, as well as an obvious unwillingness from other doctors to have her placed under their care. So here she remained.

"And that is how Aradia Medigo died."

Kanaya finished her tale with a tired sigh. "I feel rather more empty now than when I began this tale. I suppose that may be a good thing."

"What does this have to do with me?" Rose asked.

"You spoke of a ghost. Now you know who that ghost is and why she became so," was all Kanaya said. She smiled sadly. "I suppose I could answer some of your other questions now, if you so wish."

"Wait. I tell you about ghost, and you _don't _think I'm barking mad?"

Another sad smile. "No."

"Why not?"

"I-"

The door to Rose's room suddenly opened, and both women jumped. Dr. Egbert looked at Rose. He appeared to be slightly flustered. "Rose?" he said. "Your mother is here to see you."


	8. Chapter 8

The only reason this wasn't updated earlier is because I felt like it could be longer and continually put off writing more. A month later I realized that that was dumb, so here you go. Sorry for the long wait.

...

Rose's mother was sitting in a chair in the front lobby, flipping nonchalantly through one of the provided magazines and muttering to herself as she turned the glossy pages, occasionally tittering over what was either a hilarious article or a ridiculously-designed article of clothing. She looked up as Rose entered the room and smiled beatifically, showing her teeth in a way that half the male populace of the city found unbearably attractive, and the other half slightly disturbing. Mrs. Lalonde was a woman with an exceedingly forceful personality, and Rose wondered how long she would have before the questions about newfound relationships began to shoot out from that personality with bullet-like force. If it wasn't related to the workplace, it was related to the mental institution. She sat down one chair away from her mother and resigned herself to conversation. Kanaya had offered to accompany her, but Rose had declined the request and the troll was now no doubt hovering anxiously just around the corner where Rose could not see her. She had that type of demeanor.

"So, have you found anyone nice?" were the first words out of her mother's mouth. Rose tried to resist the urge to roll her eyes and failed. It was just so typical of her mother to put relationships before wellbeing. She put it down to Mrs. Lalonde's failure in her own, which either worked out beautifully only to be torn apart by some tragic twist of fate, or went horribly and ended with her mother booting the poor man out the front door to the accompaniment of some witty retort. It was almost unreal, going from a serious discussion with Kanaya about the death of Aradia Medigo, to being forced to describe her lack of partner in this dreary place.

"No, Mother," she sighed.

"Really? What about that lovely nurse who came to get you on the first day? No? Really?"

"Mother, I am currently attempting to reform my mental status and rejoin society as a fully functioning human being. Do you really think I have time to be looking for a steady relationship?" Especially in a place like this, she added mentally. This was a mental hospital, not a dating site for lonely hearts.

"Well, you can't blame me for trying. So how are you doing?"

"Well enough." Her mother demanded an account of all that had occurred since Rose had first been enrolled as a patient, and she reluctantly obliged, though she made sure to omit her adventures - for lack of a better word, although she felt that it placed her in a position typically reserved for children who went traipsing through wardrobes or were swept off by tornadoes - and the peculiar discoveries that she had made. No doubt the revelation of such information would result in an unwanted investigation, if not into the slew of knowledge she had collected, then into her psyche, and while her weekly meetings with Dr. Egbert and Dr. Harley were unavoidable she would have preferred not to have her grey matter be more thoroughly investigated. "And yourself?"

"Quite all right, although I-what in the world?" Mrs. Lalonde stared over Rose's shoulder, an expression of shock writ plainly across her face. Rose wondered if she had suddenly developed some sort of disease that caused her to be shocked by potted plants, but shut up such thoughts as soon as she turned to follow her mother's gaze. Nepeta stood at the entrance to the lobby, her long green coat spotted with stains of the same color but a slightly darker shade. The same stains were also streaked across the palms of her hands and the bridge of her nose, like war paint, and the troll girl was breathing heavily, as though she had just run a long distance. She pointed an accusing finger at Rose.

"You!" she squeaked, baring a set of tiny, almost childlike fangs. Rose, unsure of what to make of Nepeta's statement, glanced at her mother to gauge her reaction. The woman was peering curiously at Nepeta, in much the same way as one might observe an animal at a zoo. Behind her, the receptionist had picked up her phone and was speaking rapidly into the mouthpiece, no doubt calling the doctors to the front lobby. Nepeta had none of the escort that patients typically received, and Rose wondered why she was here, and if she had followed her from the room beneath the building. Is so, then how had she not been spotted by anyone? Unless, Rose realised, she had, which would account for the odd stains. Troll blood came in a variety of colors, ranging from a red that was almost human to a bright tyrian purple, as it was called. The troll girl must have been accosted, only to have attacked whoever had tried to stop her. Her worry increased when she remembered something else - didn't Kanaya have green blood?

Rose stood as Nepeta started forwards, the claws on her toes clicking against the floor, her coat dragging behind her like a train. There was no sign of any doctor coming to apprehend the patient, nor of Equius, who had appeared to be very protective of his assistant, if that was the right word. "Did you follow me from downstairs?" she asked. Nepeta stopped and blinked at her with wide, owlish eyes. They had a glazed, uncertain look to them, like the eyes of a sleeper who has just woken up and is not yet sure of where they are.

"She said to come and fetch you," the troll girl said, and though her voice was high and sharp, there was a dull tone to it, a certain flatness. Rose frowned. There was something off here, but she could not for the life of her figure out what it was.

"Who said?" she asked. Another blink.

"She did." Rose noted that Nepeta had not actually answered her original question, nor the second one. "She said it was important that you come."

"Who? Kanaya? Aradia?" Rose demanded.

A pause, and then Nepeta said: "Yes."

"If you refuse to give me a straight answer, then I'm afraid I won't be accompanying you anywhere."

Suddenly, Nepeta snarled and charged towards Rose, knocking her onto her back and sending the wind out of her lungs. She heard her mother gasp and leap out of her seat as Mrs. Lalonde attempted to pry the ravenous troll off of her daughter, but Nepeta twisted and lashed out at her with a set of sharp and yellowed claws, drawing blood. Bright red drops pattered to the floor next to Rose's hand, and her mother backed away into a corner, clutching her bleeding arm while her face twisted itself into a grimace of pain. Rose attempted to knock Nepeta off of her chest, but received the same scratching in return and breathed in sharply as pain flared in her hand. The cuts felt shallow, but blood flowed from them like water and stained the bottom of her shirtsleeve red.

Seemingly satisfied that her prey would not fight back now that it was injured, Nepeta leaped back onto her feet with surprising agility and began dragging Rose out of the lobby and towards the hall by the crook of her elbow. Rose looked pleadingly at her mother as she tried to hoist herself onto her feet and reduce the troll's grip, but the woman only shook her head helplessly in return. Rose's scowl returned, and she winced as Nepeta's pace increased and the tiles rubbed uncomfortably against the small of her back and bumped against her elbows. It was like being a rag doll, slave to the whims of her childlike owner; while Rose was strong, Nepeta was stronger. Despite her kicks and struggles she could make no headway against the troll's grip.

As they rounded the corner, she spied Kanaya lying limply on the ground, the floor around her covered in a pool of deep jade green, and Rose reached out for the troll's hand as she passed. She breathed a sigh of relief when Kanaya's fingers curled around her own in response, but the link was broken all too quickly as Nepeta strode onwards without heed to the bleeding nurse.

Just as Rose was about to shriek from indignation, she felt a pair of hands wrap themselves around her waist and hoist her up into the air. She found herself looking down a broad back at the ground and swaying dizzily as she was carried forwards by a new courier. The stench of unwashed skin and sweat filled her nostrils, and she wrapped one hand around her nose. Now she knew where Equius had gotten to. He had been waiting just around the corner, ready to receive the package from Nepeta - and that was just what she was, at the moment, for all the good her efforts to escape did. Where in the world were the doctors? Had they too been rendered unconscious, like Kanaya? She couldn't understand why she had suddenly been dragged off in this manner; Equius had seemed perfectly willing to let her go when they had first parted, unless it had all been part of some elaborate plot. This hospital was beginning to become less trustworthy by the minute, and it comforted her to know that at least Kanaya was not in on whatever nefarious plans her abductors had for her.

Looking in front of her, she could see Nepeta gamboling along behind Equius, her eyes darting warily from side to side, as though she were expecting an ambush to burst out of the walls at any moment. To Rose's dismay, such an ambush was not forthcoming, and the lack of action on the part of the hospital staff spun new worries in her mind.

After turning several more corners, she heard the sound of a door opening, and as Equius passed into the hallway beyond she saw that it much resembled the one that she had wandered down upon her own venture into the bowels of the hospital, albeit without so many stairs as it was on a lower floor. The room she had found the operating lab in must have multiple entrances, she decided, unless she was being taken somewhere else entirely. She hoped that her assumption would be correct, as it would be easier to formulate an escape if she already knew of a route that would lead her to safety. Providing she could outrun Equius, that was.

Rose's gut lurched uncomfortably as Equius began descending suddenly down a set of stairs. She watched as Nepeta closed the door through which they had entered and withdrew a long chain from one of her coat pockets, which she wound around the handle and snapped shut with a lock. The door itself already had a lock; Rose guessed that the key was not available at the moment, perhaps even in the hands of the hospital staff, who seemed to have resolutely remained wherever they would be of least assistance.

"I assume there is a perfectly reasonable explanation for this unprecedented kidnapping?" she asked. She hoped that Equius would be more responsive than Nepeta had been, but all she received in reply was a noncommittal grunt, accompanied by a heavy sigh. "Could you at least tell me who is responsible for this?" she demanded, accompanying the statement with a kick that did not seem to have any effect on the massive troll. He strode unconcernedly through yet another door, and suddenly Rose found herself being dumped unceremoniously onto a white-tiled floor in a manner typically reserved for large sacks of potatoes. She squinted in the bright white lights that glared down from the ceiling and struggled to her feet, wiping imaginary dust from her skirt with the air of one who is quite finished being pushed around and would like some answers, please.

Several seconds later, she received them, as an all-to-familiar voice said snidely: "Of course - this was all the good Doctor's plan."

Rose whipped around, startled and angry. She felt the corner of her eye begin to twitch, and had the familiar silver-and-black operating table not lain between her and Vriska, she would have darted forwards and attempted to throttle the troll. While violence was not her typical reaction to unpleasant things, she felt that the current situation perfectly merited such a response. "What are you playing at? What doctor? Did Doctor Egbert arrange this little fiasco?" she snapped. Equius must have somehow sensed her malicious intent, for she felt his hands wrap around her forearms, preventing her from achieving any movement forwards beyond a small shuffle of the feet. Vriska threw back her head and cackled in a manner that Rose felt was far too dramatic.

"Don't be ridiculous, he knows nothing of this. All he has are guesses and silly theories. I am referring to Doc Scratch, of course. But you haven't heard of him, haaaaaaaave you?"

Rose shook her head.

"_Dorogoi, dorogoi_, you're so ignorant it's almost funny! The good Doc is searching for the Seer. You know what I'm talking about, don't you? The Seer of Light, prophet of the horrorterrors. Among other things, but those aren't as important. He's been searching for a loooooooong time now. And guess what, he's found her at last!" Vriska gestured to Rose with a broad sweep of her arms, as though showing off some sort of expensive vase to prospective buyers.

"Is that why you had me brought down here?" Rose asked. "Because you think that I'm this Seer of Light? Some sort of prophet? I can't even make a decent prediction of how the stock exchanges for the next week are going to progress, much to the chagrin of my coworkers. And even if I am this so-called Seer, I have no interest in being caught up in whatever plans you might have involving him or her or it. All I want is to remain here without any trouble until I am no longer bothered by my nightmares, and that includes you. I fail to understand how you are involved in all of this, anyways. You did not particularly strike me as the type to allow yourself to be controlled by others."

Vriska raised an eyebrow. "Why in the world would you think that? I'm the one who's in control here, Rose. How do you think you were brought here?"

Rose twisted awkwardly and stared up at Equius's face. She realised that he bore the same blank expression as Nepeta, his eyes clouded over and unblinking. Turning back to face Vriska, she realised that despite the troll's bravado, there was a look of intense concentration in her eyes. "Are you controlling them?"

"Them, and several others, not like it matters," replied Vriska dismissively. "Now, enough chatter, let's get down to business! Put her down on the table, _bespoleznyĭ kusok_," she barked at Equius. The blueblood sluggishly complied, hoisting Rose up again and all but dropping her onto the operating table. The impact, while slightly softened by the leather cushions, rattled Rose's spine and made her clench her hands into fists as thick velcro straps were wrapped around her wrists, waist, and ankles. What were they going to do to her? She struggled against the restraints, but all she succeeded in doing was creating a good deal of noise as the operating table wobbled unsteadily on its wheels.

"Release me immediately! I told you I want no part in this!" she shouted at the top of her lungs. Perhaps if she was lucky the sound would carry far enough and someone would hear her and come to her aid. It was a small hope, but worth a shot. Vriska rolled her eyes.

"Stop making this difficult, I hate getting frustrated. Knock her out, then we'll finish with this." Another command directed at Equius, who rolled up Rose's sleeve and jabbed a needle into the crook of her arm. A cold sensation spread slowly up her arm, accompanied by a haze that pulled itself sluggishly over her mind. Against her will, she found herself sinking away into darkness, and was dimly aware of a cold set of fingers pressed against her forehead and another jab into her arm, before all feeling faded from her body and she was left floating helplessly in the void.

Somewhere in the blackness, things began to whisper.

...

And here we see of the return of one of the oldest plot devices in the book, the convenient blackout. I plead guilty an request that the jury not judge me too harshly.

_Bespoleznyĭ kusok _means "useless lump," if Google translate is anything to be believed.

And _dorogoi _means "darling."


	9. Chapter 9

In which more convoluted and brain-hurting events occur.

...

Rose awoke to find her field of vision swimming with green, and for a moment she thought that something must have gone wrong with the neural centers of her brain to alter her perception of reality so. Derse had been a bright shade of violet, not this collection of shades that made her feel as though she had been buried beneath a pile of emeralds. Then her vision swam into focus and she realised that the architecture, from what she could see, was subtly different from that of the dream moon - less gothic citadel and more Victorian housing. In the background, a clock ticked steadily, and the noise burrowed past the haze that lay over her mind and caused her to flinch as the noise gradually became louder.

She sat up gingerly, rubbing at her eyes and glancing around in an attempt to get her bearings. There were no clues that she could find. The green room was certainly not a part of the hospital, unless the hidden rooms beneath the complex ran even deeper than she had imagined, but she did not see the point of being knocked out in the laboratory just to be moved to another part of the underground levels. If they had not wanted her to know where she was being taken, they could just have easily knocked her unconscious when they had first abducted her. There was always the possibility that Vriska had wanted her to remain awake so that she would have a chance to gloat, but Rose suspected that was not the case. How had the troll escaped from her room, anyways? She decided to focus on that question later, when she had less pressing concerns to deal with.

Rose knew that the room was also not a part of Derse. The moon had been so solid in its color scheme that she doubted it would contain a room in such a contrasting series of shades, even if the room was secret. She was somewhere else entirely.

She stood and stumbled over a long black cane lying on the ground. It had been bent in half by someone who must have possessed great strength, for the cane was solid metal all the way through. Rose decided she would allow alarm to overtake her reasoning capabilities later, when the owner of the strength actually returned. She was alone in the room for now, with the only other noises the ticking of the clock.  
>It stood against the far wall, framed by a set of bookshelves whose contents were also green. After a closer examination she found that the pages were colored this shade as well and were blank, unless someone had jokingly made the text green as well.<p>

"There hardly seems to be a point to any of this," she remarked, and slid the book she held back into its place, turning her attentions to the clock. It was an entirely different set of colors from the rest of the room, which Rose found refreshing. Her eyes had begun to grow tired of the monochromatic color scheme, and she suspected that if she had been forced to stare at it for any longer she would have lost control of her vision. The clock was split in half, one side painted the Dersite violet, and the other a bright shade of yellow that was almost blinding. In the center of the clock face was a symbol - a sun, with long tendrils reaching outwards. Rose felt as though she had seen it somewhere before, though she could not say where.

Suddenly there was a loud crash from behind her and she jumped, spinning around and trying to look fierce. She cast a glance towards the twisted metal cane on the ground and wondered if she should use it as a weapon, but as the little black man shuffled into the room she realised that it wasn't necessary. He appeared to be a Dersite, although instead of the multicolored garb he was dressed in a simple black coat and hat. The man scowled at her as he headed towards the desk by the door and removed his hat, shoving in handfuls of small black objects into the headpiece before placing it back on his head with some dignity. His bizarre task apparently finished, he turned and left the room with the same volume as he had arrived, slamming the door shut with such ferocity that Rose was surprised it didn't fall of its hinges.

She sighed and wandered towards the table in order to investigate the subject of the man's interest further, but her course of action was almost immediately interrupted by the door opening once again, though the man who entered this time - if he was a man - was vastly different from the previous one. He wore a neat white jacket, and where his head should have been was a large white globe. Rose wondered if the thing was some sort of mask and what its purpose was, and then why it wouldn't be a mask.

_Hello_, said the man, and his voice was like the echo of a steel drum. It was half there and yet entirely real, and made Rose's head hurt. _I have been waiting to meet you for some time, Rose Lalonde._

"And who are you, exactly?" Rose demanded. She was determined not to be intimidated by anything her accoster could conjure up.

_My name is Doc Scratch. Perhaps you've heard of me before?_

Rose remembered that Vriska had mentioned someone of the same name. "I have," she said slowly. "And if you are who you claim to be, I don't suppose you would mind explaining things a bit more clearly to me? Your 'agent' is very fond of being cryptic."

_Of course. I have no objections to exposition, although I suspect that my ramblings may begin to annoy you after a certain point. Serket certainly had no patience for them, but that was a small flaw in the grand scheme of things, and quite easy to pass over_, said Doc Scratch.

"And to what grand scheme might you be referring to?"

_Your role as the Seer of Light, of course. Why else do you think you have been experiencing such vivid visions? Vivid enough to cause you to admit yourself to a mental facility, which I admit I did not expect, but judging from your resourcefulness I suppose it was the inevitable course of action. Although perhaps visions is not the proper word. To call them prophecies might be more apt, previews of what is to come._

"And what do these visions prophecy, exactly?"

_I should have thought that would be obvious._

"Not to me."

_You really are rather dull. I refer to the end of the world, of course._

Rose opened her mouth to comment but found herself lost for words. The end of the world? Surely not. "What-" she began, but Doc Scratch held up a hand, stopping her sentence in its tracks.

_The arrival of the gods of the furthest ring is not something to be taken lightly, Miss Lalonde. After all, they are beings as old as the universe, and the arrival of such beings on Earth is bound to have consequences. Perhaps it would ease your mind if I said that instead of the end of the world, it would simply mean the end of the world as you know it. There are a great many changes in store, and you can be sure that you will not fail to notice a single one of them._

"But why now?" Rose asked, finally finding her voice again. "Why now? What possible reason could the Horrorterrors have for coming back?"

Doc Scratch could not have smiled through his mask, but the tone of his voice told Rose that he was hiding a smug grin somewhere close at hand. _Who can tell? 'Though shalt not know the day or the hour,' as some of your people say._

"But that's Christianity, not some alien religion."

_There are many common variables scattered throughout time and space. Religions are but one of them. _

"You know, I almost wish I was back with Vriska at the moment," Rose remarked sardonically. "She may have been slightly abusive, but at least her information was slightly direct. While she may have been cryptic she was at least honest about it, whereas you seem to be withholding information simply because you can, and I see no reason for it. If you plan to tell me what exactly is occurring, then do so, and if you do not then there is no point to keeping me here."

_And who are you to judge what the purpose of any of my actions is? Perhaps you have been brought here for reasons other than information._ A pause, and then, _There is someone I would like you to meet._ Doc Scratch snapped his fingers and the door behind him opened for a third time, though the person who entered through it was far different than the other two men, and on a closer examination Rose found that the girl appeared to be awfully familiar.

"Aradia?" she asked. The troll girl gave her a sullen look and shook her head, and Rose realised that this girl could not be Aradia, for she was far younger-looking than the ghost girl, and her features were slightly more angular. She turned to Doc Scratch. "Who is this?"

_She is my handmaid. I thought it might interest you to know that you are not alone in your service._ The troll who was not Aradia furrowed her brow and began to inch towards the other end of the room, removing the chopsticks stuck through the messy bun at the back of her head and clutching them in her hands like a pair of knives. Without warning, she knocked Rose aside and rushed towards Doc Scratch, raising her chopsticks as though she intended to jam them through the place where the man's eyes should be, and Rose felt a fleeting feeling of hope rush through her mind. It was short-lived. Doc Scratch reached up and deftly grabbed the troll girl by the scruff of her neck, holding her at arms length while she struggled to reach his face and make some mark upon it with her weapons.

_Really now, Handmaid. What have I told you about misbehaving? And in front of a guest, too. You don't want to set a bad example for her, do you?_ His words were calm, but Rose sensed the threat behind them and wondered if she was expected to enlist in the service of this strange man, who did not even dare to show her his true face. _I'm afraid you will have to go now, Handmaid. I was considering letting you speak with Miss Lalonde, but now I think it is better is you do not. Please excuse me a moment._ These last words were directed at Rose, as Doc Scratch held the so-called Handmaid under his arm like a bundle of newspapers and exited the room, closing the door behind him. Rose listened for his footsteps to die away, but could hear nothing but the sound of her own breathing. She wondered if she could somehow find a way of escaping this place before her mysterious accoster returned.

The door on the opposite end of the room was unlocked, much to her delight, and before exiting she knelt and picked up the crooked metal cane. A weapon might come in handy, if Doc Scratch turned out to be malevolent. That wasn't to say that his intentions didn't already appear to be of a slightly malicious intent, but it could always be worse, and Rose liked to be prepared.

She left the room and emerged into a long hallway with staircases on either end, the one on the left leading up and the one on the right leading down. A steady ticking emanated from both directions, and as she looked she saw that a number of clocks of various shapes and sizes were scattered by the entrances to the stairwells, though none of them read the same time. "This is bizarre," she muttered, and headed right, figuring that the exit would be somewhere on the lower levels.

As she walked down the stairs she observed that there were a number of paintings on the walls, all of them with sharply contrasting color palettes, and all of them appearing to depict some sort of violent scene. In one, a red planet appeared to be exploding into a twisting spiral of light, while a small green figure stood at the center of the cataclysm. In another, a green sun illuminated the face of that selfsame figure, though Rose could not make out its distinct features. The paintings were vague, the details few, and the more she looked at them the more she began to feel that the artwork had a somewhat childish quality. The symbolic representation was certainly a contributing factor to this theory. She wondered if the Handmaid had drawn them, and what it was that they depicted.

Tucking these questions into the back of her mind for later contemplation, she continued onwards, the series of paintings growing more and more disturbing as she went, until she found herself unable to gaze upon them without experiencing a horrible feeling of imminent destruction. Instead she forced herself to look straight ahead and focus on proceeding downwards, one step at a time. She felt that she had undergone far too many experiences with stairs and downwards movement in these past few weeks, and wondered if it would be better if she turned around and pursued a more upwardly direction instead. However, the stairs suddenly came to an end, and she found her desire for elevation dissipate.

A large window spanned the far wall of this new room, and through it Rose could see a towering city of deep green spires intermixed with grey buildings that seemed out of place and yet melded seamlessly with the rest of the landscape. The sky above the horizon was the color of pitch, and in it loomed a large dark planet, with a bright violet moon arcing around it in a slow orbit. It was unlike anything she had seen before, and Rose wondered where she really was, for there was not even the faintest hint of Skaian roots in any of her surroundings.

_Enjoying the view, I see_, said a voice behind her, and Rose turned to see Doc Scratch standing at the foot of the staircase with his arms folded behind his back. She raised her makeshift weapon threateningly, but the man failed to react, either because he failed to notice it or because he was unconcerned. _I should have guessed that you would leave the room after my exit. Of course, that is a ridiculous sentiment, as I already knew. I have no need for guesses, being omniscient. _

"You might have mentioned that fact earlier," said Rose. "What happened to the Handmaid? And where am I? What is this place?" She gestured wildly to the landscape outside the window.

_The Handmaid is being taught a lesson for her misbehavior. As for your location, the world you see in the sky is one that was once called Alternia. It is a dead world now, but I still reside here on one of its moons, in order to keep watch and to prepare. We are in a place separate from the incipisphere, where Skaia and the Furthest Ring are located. The Horrorterrors have no influence here._ Doc Scratch sounded almost smug as he said this.

"And I suppose that that's the reason for bringing me here?" Rose asked.

_One of them. The others are more convoluted, but all will become clear in time. I merely desired to speak with you briefly and gauge your strengths. Insofar I can see that I will not be disappointed. You will serve me well, Seer of Light._

Rose raised an eyebrow. "I thought the Seer of Light was a servant of the Horrorterrors."

_Oh, so you _have_ been paying attention. Well done. I suppose that that was the intended purpose of the Seer of Light, but now I am making what might be called an intervention._

"And if I decide to ignore your intervention?"

_I'm afraid that ignorance is not an option at this point, Miss Lalonde. _Somewhere in the distance a chorus of clocks began to chime the hour._ Ah, it would appear that our time is up. I greatly enjoyed our conversation, as brief as it was. I hope to see you again soon._

"But-" Rose's objection was cut off as her vision began to swim, and the ringing of the clocks grew louder and louder until she could scarcely hear anything else, not even her own voice as she cried out, or thought she cried out. Lights flashed on and off in front of her eyes with an epileptic frequency, and then suddenly resolved themselves into a white-hot point of light that grew steadily larger, until she felt as though she was flying through a dark tunnel with the exit far away at the other end. It was like the tunnel people described seeing as they were dying, she thought, but surely she couldn't be dying, unless Vriska had done something to her while her mind had been otherwise occupied with interdimensional travel. The troll wouldn't have dared. Would she?

The light grew brighter all too quickly, and Rose sat up with a yell, bracing herself for any sort of conflict. She was quite surprised when she found that she was no longer in the laboratory, but in her own room in the hospital. Someone had undressed her and put her into her nightclothes, and when she looked out of the window she could see the other patients lounging peacefully - or not so peacefully, in the case of a few - in the sunlight. And there, leaning against the tree where Rose had first met her, was Vriska.

...

THE PLOT THICKENS, HAHA.


	10. Author's Note

To those of you who were expecting a new chapter, sorry. As a general thing, I apologize for the long break, which is, unfortunately, bound to become a full-fledged hiatus as I rewrite this entire story and figure out where exactly I want the plot to go. As it is I feel like I'm beginning to descend into a clusterfuck of plot holes and trailing ends and unsatisfying narrative skills, hence the rewrite. It might not take as long as I think it will, but you never know so I figure I might as well drop this warning here.

Once I do finish the rewrite I'll post another note here so that you can go back and give the thing a good re-read-through, as there's definitely going to be some new information and possibly rearrangement of certain events.

Again, sorry about the delay, and thanks ever so much for putting up with my literary fuckwittage.


End file.
